Web Spy: AnyClip

By Laura Dondero

[There are over 100 million sites on the Internet. 100 million! You might think you know about all the important ones (CollegeCandy, Gmail, Google, TFLN…), but there are thousands of other sweet sites out there (like Live Mocha, ThredUP, and Blah Therapy) and more showing up every day! We get it – it’s not easy or fun sifting through the crap and porn to find those gems, so we’re gonna bring the gems to you. Just sit back, kick up those feet and allow us to introduce you to the diamonds in the internet rough.]

Every movie has iconic and memorable moments.  You know what I’m talking about: the “King of the World” scene in Titanic, The Wizard of Oz‘s “There’s no place like home,” or even “We’re going streaking!” from Old School.  These are the parts you quote over and over, and part of the reason you watch the movie again and again.

In the past, if you wanted to watch your a particular part of a movie, you’d have to pop in the DVD (or even the VHS) and skip forward until you found the scene you were looking for.  Now, that seems like a lot of work for our internet-centered culture, and now we’re more likely to just search YouTube.  But that isn’t always the best option, either – the video clips you find on there are most likely against copyright law to even be on YouTube in the first place, are probably longer than what you want to watch, and are usually bad quality. Or, worse, they are just reenactments by bored 16-year-old boys in their basement on a Saturday night.

But now there’s AnyClip.  AnyClip is a site dedicated to indexing all the best moments from virtually any movie ever made (and seeks to do so legally through licensing deals with movie studios).  You simply type in the movie name, the actor, or even part of a quote, and AnyClip searches their gigantic database to find the exact clip you’re looking for (with better quality than most found on YouTube), along with the dialogue included in the scene.  Each clip also includes links to other moments in the movie and links to the pages of the movie’s actors in the scene–so you can spend hours watching only the funniest parts of The Hangover or cracking up at all of Will Ferrell’s best movie lines.

Right now, the site is still in beta, which means although you can find almost any quote you’re looking for, not a lot of the scenes have videos attached to them yet.  However, the people behind AnyClip are working hard to add more clips over the coming weeks, and eventually, they hope to even have entire films available.

I’m not exaggerating, I’ve spent hours on this site.  It sucks you in.  It’s the perfect procrastination tool, so try it out the next time you don’t feel like writing that English paper… but I’m warning you, if you do, that paper might not ever get finished!