With Sympler, Video Mixing is as Simple as Tapping Out a Beat

By Dana Sedgwick

It’s not too long ago that the residents of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood were lounging in McCarren Park taking in the sights and sounds of the JellyNYC pool parties and BBMing their other friends to tell them why they should be jealous (ha).

Today, those same hipsters are capturing short videos with their smartphones and one of the creators behind those parties has figured out a fun (and creative) way to share them.

Sympler is video-mixing app. Its interface is simple, based off of the classic MPC. Each spot on the grid can be populated with anything saved to your camera – Vine, Instagram, stills, clips, etc. Music is key to the equation, allowing those of us less comfortable to find a flow, but also allowing for sophisticated producers to create something next level… tapping each tile in time to the music produces a fully edited video in seconds.

We sat down with Founder, Alexander Kane, to talk about his vision to lower the barrier to participation in video creation and heighten the level of creativity at the same time.

Download Sympler from the App Store here

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SoundCtrl: People know you best as the man behind JellyNYC, the infamous “Pool Parties” and the concerts down at Williamsburg’s East River Park. How did you get into app development?

Alexander Kane: Before JELLY and Pool Parties I was a music video director and always had a nagging urge to involve a wider audience in the process. For too long filmmaking and video has been reserved for the few.  So, as Pool Parties was coming to an end, it felt like the right time to build a product that had the same democratic spirit. What Pool Parties did for partygoers Sympler does for budding video makers.

SC: Did your experience in creating these extravaganzas drive any inspiration for the app?

AK: Definitely. The spirit of Pool Parties is very much core to the philosophy of the app. Democratizing fun for creative kids is still what we’re doing. With Pool Parties we deliberately had very few barriers during the first few years.  There was a ‘no VIP’ philosophy.   As producers, we didn’t create the experience, we provided the necessary elements to let the audience define the narrative.  That was what made Pool Parties so special.   Also, the transformative power of music was key.   Sympler provides users with the necessary elements, leverages the power of music, and trusts the user to tell their story.

SC:  Who is the full team behind Sympler?

AK: It’s me and Ben Jenkins who comes from the brand innovation and youth advertising world. While I was directing music videos and running JELLY he was studying the motivations for the young consumers of brands like Coke, Axe, PUMA and Levis. He’d been working on building tech solutions for those youth audiences for the last 14 years. We’ve also worked with Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn, two great developers who have experience in game design and interactive experiences.

SC: This app is coming just as mobile video sharing is become more and more common – Instagram, Vine, & Snapchat all allow users to capture short video and share it with their friends. How do you envision Sympler co-mingling with these types of products?

AK: Yes – it’s pretty good timing. The ecosystem is actually pretty key to us for a couple of reasons: Firstly Vine and Instagram are constraining people to smaller clips which is good for us as we help you mix together those short clips. Secondly people are just becoming more comfortable with video as a medium and they’re more inclined to share their output now. Sympler is great for mixing and editing content from different sources in an organic and rhythmic way – whether it’s stills from Instagram, 6 second clips from Vine or heavily treated video from 8mm – we become a really easy way to mash up content from the various sources. So the more video apps out there with filters and effects, the better for us.

SC: We’ve all seen examples of how some creatives have taken easy-to-use products like Vine and Instagram and taken them to the next level… have you seen any instances on Sympler that have surprised you or taken the app in a direction you didn’t imagine?

AK: Yes – we’ve given it to a few music producers who are already adept at mixing beats and sounds. They’ve manipulated this as they do their music mixing tools and turned raw video content into music. The other surprise was the way that some people have used this as a final compositing tool after creating video and images in other apps and finishing it off in Sympler.  We were also surprised by how diverse the output from our users has been.  What we expected going in was that timing and rhythm was at the core of the barrier to quality video making.  Which is why we put music in the foreground.  Once someone feels confident mixing a video to a beat, his or her output changes dramatically.  They start using Sympler to create videos of all different genres.

SC: If you could put this app into the hand of any artist, who would it be and why?

AK: This is a tough one.  There are so many out there who we want using the app, because we’d love to see what they create with it.  Michel Gondry comes to mind.  He’s someone who I admired as a young music video director. Not only is he a visionary filmmaker, he’s also a drummer.  I have a feeling he’d create some crazy shit with the app.   Other artists include: Jay Z’s DJ – Young Guru (whose manager we’re already speaking with). Young Guru isn’t just a great DJ and sound engineer but is all about educating kids and leveling the playing field when it comes to his craft and creativity in music.