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Homemade videos just got a bit more bite.
Discovery Digital Networks on Thursday lent some of its computer-generated dinosaur footage to be used in the personal movies created with the Magisto video-editing app.
In a collision of fantasy and reality that borrows its inspiration from films like “Jurassic Park,” the Magisto app intersperses snippets of the dinosaur footage alongside the user’s own photos and videos to create a polished short film.
One piece of test footage depicts grainy, horror-film-style video of a young woman in a suburban setting who suddenly finds herself being pursued by a velociraptor. It’s even got the menacing, violin-heavy score to heighten the drama.
The dinosaurs will join the dozen video themes Magisto offers to describe certain cinematic styles — such as indie, sentimental or Roaring Twenties. To create a movie with the app, users choose their smartphone images and videos, the theme and soundtrack, and the application does the rest, automatically inserting transitions and applying Ken Burns-like effects.
Discovery conducted an initial test with a travel theme, providing Magisto with an hour’s worth of library footage. The B-roll was incorporated into some 800,000 movies that attracted four million views. A subsequent experiment featured nature footage that powered a “wild nature” theme.
“We kind of just want to see if we can bring our brands into some of these stories,” said Jim Louderback, Discovery Digital Network’s general manager.
Discovery hopes to draw attention to its brand and some of the network’s forthcoming programming — Louderback said he is weighing a summer sloth theme to build anticipation (ever so slowly) for the cable network’s forthcoming “Sloth Week.”
Louderback said he hopes the use of the network’s library content in personal videos will one day provide a new market for archival footage that’s “sitting around in the closet.”
Meanwhile, Magisto is using its Discovery partnership to showcase how brand marketers can use its video editing platform to reach consumers through lifestyle programming.
Reid Genauer, the company’s chief marketing officer, said he has already sold campaigns to a range of companies, from packaged goods to theme parks.
“As long as we continue to pair relevant brands with relevant lifestyles, they can bring content that elevates the production value and quality of the user narrative,” Genauer said.
Here’s an example of the sort of video that Magisto can turn out:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
