GIFs are easy to share. Photos are easy to share. Videos are easy to share. But what about mixing them all together? That’s the idea behind Captioned, a new iOS app that allows users to create 60-second multimedia videos that mix photos, GIFs, video clips, and audio into one easily shared video. The app launched on Tuesday, October 10.
The 60-second-or-less videos, called Captions, are created in the app through both a library of GIFs and other assets, together with the user’s own visual content produced using a built-in camera. The visual is then paired with the user’s own recorded audio — making it easy to turn everything from jokes to rants into something that’s both visual and auditory. The app is designed to encompass a variety of different types of media as well as topics, allowing users to create Captions on anything from a parody video to news commentary or even a video meme with custom audio.
“In 2017, people are expressing themselves with visual content like GIFs, memes, emojis, and videos. And this new and highly expressive media type is extremely engaging and fun to make, which is exciting to us,” said Captioned co-founder Ian Ownbey, who launched the app with Jacob Thornton.
The app is designed to mix the different types of content to create a unique piece for sharing on social media — including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The developer says that beta users have seen as much as 10 times more interactions from their Captions over other social media content.
Data and growing industry trends suggest that 74 percent of internet traffic comes from video. Captioned aims to make it easy to create video content that incorporates a variety of different media types. By pairing easily accessible visuals with the user’s own recorded audio, Captioned creates a sort of mini-podcast accompanied by visual assets, turning audio into the more engaging, all-powerful video.
Along with sharing the videos on existing social media networks, the Captioned app also has a home page where users can find other Captions to watch as well as other users to follow.
“We think [Captioned] is a really fun, addictive new media type, and our experiments in beta have shown that people love them,” Thornton said.
Captioned is now available to download from the App Store.
