Our friends over at I Care If You Listen shared a great post about a tool for audio wizards. Conceived as a “sonic Swiss Army knife,” Pocket Audio Tools currently offers four tools for composers and sound designers. Check out their video and read more here.

Our last C+T post covered Amazon’s entry into the art world and this week we stumbled across something which we think is even cooler. Uprise Art is essentially a rent to own model. There are lots of art lovers out there who don’t have the funds to buy a piece outright, but they wouldn’t mind making smaller payments on it. Much like a home or a computer you’ve financed, Uprise lets you have art hanging on your walls before you’ve fully paid for it. The Uprise staff seems to be curating really wonderful art pieces and it appears they ARE taking submissions. If you’re an artist with a solid collection built up, our suggestion is that you reach out and start a conversation with them. Not only does this seem like a great way to find new customers, but it appears to be a solid mechanism for earning consistent and predictable income for your work.

Amazon is getting into the art business. Fine art has lived in a bit of a bubble. Unlike music, books, and news, technology hasn’t disrupted the power of gallery owners very much. Unlike other forms of media, art isn’t quite the same online as it is in person, and galleries have leveraged that in-person emotion to ensure they remain the primary middlemen connecting producers and art lovers. Many online destinations have attempted (and failed) to take on the art business, but Amazon has the size and clout to potentially make a dent. Right now the marketplace is working with select (small and medium size) galleries to essentially increase visibility of their collection. Artists are not able to sell their art directly via Amazon which may lead many to believe this benefits speculators and galleries more than it does artists. That said, it’s worth paying attention to Amazon Art’s evolution simply because getting early involved may prove lucrative to artists (and galleries) looking for increased visibility. So who do you think will be most excited about this move? -Lazy billionaires? -Artists? -Up-and-coming galleries? -Average art appreciators?

Not everyone has the time or interest in running their own blog, so it’s exciting to see new tools like Medium growing in popularity. The team at Medium describes the site as, “A better place to read and write things that matter.” Our take is that it’s a blog collective that groups articles into broad categories. Creative professionals often manage their own sites to showcase their portfolio, but blogging often gets overlooked. Medium offers a platform to write, but one that puts less pressure on you to pump out frequent posts. There’s a psychological weight that comes with publishing your own blog. No one wants to see a blog with the newest post being something you wrote 6 months ago. With Medium, your content isn’t front and center unless it’s 1) new and 2) trending with readers. It’s a lower pressure place to test your ideas. So it doesn’t matter if you write something once a week or once a year. In terms of mechanics, Medium may be one of the easiest writing platforms we’ve ever seen. They passed on having all the bells and whistles of Wordpress to make a CMS (Content Management System) that’s incredibly clean. It’s simply a pleasure to use. From a marketing perspective there’s certainly a trade off to using Medium versus your own site. Blogging on your own site will potentially help improve the search ranking of your website, which ultimately may lead new customers your way. On the other hand, writing on Medium may make you more discoverable, and linking back to your site may help boost your rankings too. CentUp isn’t something that you can implement on Medium (yet) but we hope some day they consider adding us all into the fold as they evolve their product. In the meantime, we fully support the wonderful community Ev Williams and team are building and encourage you to join them. They’re still technically invite-only, but find some of their folks on Twitter and ask them for an invite. They’re pretty nice about letting in interested parties.

Many writers have the ability to paint pictures with their words, but when it comes to actual illustrations that’s a different story. Storyboarding is an integral part of bringing your scripts to life, but how lively can it be if your board amounts to a bunch of stick figures? Amazon recently launched “Amazon Storyteller” which is an online storyboard generator. No drawing necessary! It’s a great tool because it’s free, easy to use, online, and easy to share. While a storyboard is meant to be a broad picture of what you want the film to look like, you have the ability to alter a lot of the features to give it more detail. Features including the characters’ age, head shape, clothing, actions, and facial/body directions can all be manipulated. There are also a variety of backgrounds to choose from for different scenes, and if none of them fit the bill you can upload your own background! You can also add props from their huge selection under the “add prop” tab. This addition to Amazon is still in beta so you may not be able to find the image you want, but they’re open to feedback! There is also a trial run that I advise checking out first. You can upload your own script or play around with someone else’s. It really only takes about 10 minutes of checking out the features to get the hang of it. Storyteller is free to use for those with an Amazon Studio account. Definitely worth signing up because we all want something better than stick-figure-living for our beloved characters!