We love Animoto. Works seamlessy as well as being a Rails app. Nice one guys.

But it’s a bit too MTV for our liking (we still listen to The Smiths here, for christ’s sake). And it doesn’t let me pick a style that I know my son would love or tailor a video for a special occasion - like a birthday. So we thought we’d try to do something a little more sublime and leave the music videos to the pros.

So we’ve opened Millicent up, added a few bells and whistles and sent her off to a friendly server farm, to be strapped onto a bevy of mac minis to render your stuff 24/7. Yes, we’re building Mooky.

Mooky allows you to create beautiful video animations from your photo collection. All at full broadcast tv resolution and all from within a web browser (but we’ve made the very painless decision to not support IE 6.0, like some good friends of ours). Update: Actually IE 6 does work now, just looks a bit crap. All you do is upload your content from the desktop (+ flickr at launch), pick a template, music and we’ll do the rest of the hard graft.

In minutes you can be sending your mum a great little movie of her grandchildrens birthday party or making great motion graphic wedding invites to send to your guests. Soon, we’ll have templates for birthdays, trips, presentations, special occasions and more.

The final video uses the terrific H.264 codec, so quality is crisp & brilliant and means it’ll play on your iPhone. In fact, we’re developing a Mooky app for the iPhone as well, so you can make movies for your loved ones on the go.

It’s our first real consumer offering, which is a bit nerve racking to say the least. Below is an example of the kinda playout quality you get. I unfortunately had to delete the soundtrack for legal reasons (or that’s what the automated bot at Brightcove said). If you want to have a real play with the site (and remember this is not even an alpha release yet so it’s pretty unstable), then drop us a line - mooky (at) bestbefore (dot) tv - and we’ll see what we can do.