Silent Film Director: Cool iPhone app for creating silent movies

Silent Film Director turns your photos and videos into silent Charlie Caplin-style movies. The term “silent movie” doesn’t actually mean there’s no sound, in fact they often were scored with ragtime piano music.

This app offers three soundtracks including two 20s-sounding piano scores and a movie projector that will add the noise of an old-style movie reel spinning. Users also have the option to choose a video from the device’s music collection.

There’s six visual effects that give the movies an authentic dated look. The 20’s movie effect is the closest feature to achieving the silent movie look but there’s also five more choices to choose from; 60’s home video, 70’s home video, sepia, sepia vintage and black and white.

For those of you not familiar with silent movies the frames are commonly sped up. In other words, the movies appear to be playing slightly in fast forward. The time scale feature offers various options to pull this effect off by accelerating or slowing down the frames of your movie.

Title cards and scene transitions are available to spruce things up. Another thing often seen in silent movies are title cards which are also offered here. Before you get started, you can have a peek at a collection of videos that were made for for the app for inspiration within the showtime screen. And, your masterpieces can also be shared with the Silent Film Director community, which will enter your short films into contests.

Movies can be shared and uploaded directly within the app through YouTube, Facebook or via email. And, depending on the length of time you’re willing to wait the video processing can be altered to low, (192×144) normal (480×360) or high (640×480) quality.

Silent Film Director comes with a standard paired down version for $0.99 that merely allows users to choose a video effect, size quality and soundtrack. In order to add photos, title cards and transitions you’ll need to purchase the in-app pro tools for another $0.99.

Users of Silent Film Maker or Vintage Video Maker will just get the new app as a free update. It’s a combination of both of those apps plus more video effects and improved functionality. Silent Film Director is available for $0.99 in Apple’s app store for the iPhone and iPod touch.