(Note: We previously wrote about Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive Video being either fad or trend - and it’s definitely a trend. This article will go into more detail on some of the best examples of Choose Your Own Adventure content that are out on YouTube, the Web and even Mobile.)
Interactive video takes many forms, everything from how to instructional videos and games to community driven interaction. With the advancement of emerging technologies however, choose your own adventure video (CYOA) has given Edward Packard’s storytelling format of yesteryear a kick towards the digital mainstream. Its resurgence can be credited partly to YouTube for easing the development process and establishing its prominence within the community; although independent Flash executions, Blu-ray DVDs and mobile applications are also unlocking the potential of CYOA video.
With the introduction of YouTube Annotations, out went the programmer. All you need is a good storyteller that understands interactive, a computer and a camera.
To date, there have been a few successful attempts at CYOA’s leaning toward the higher end of the YouTube production scale. “The Time Machine”, a third-person CYOA in which it is your mission to get Chad, Matt and Rob to their twelve o’clock meeting without dying, and “Follow Your Instinct”, a first-person CYOA in which you awake after a long night with a lovely lady. Late for a meeting, you either choose to follow your instinct to successfully navigate the outcome of your day or make all the wrong moves. Each CYOA video uses comedy as the basis of its storytelling narrative; one is in the science fiction genre, the other aims for aspiring lifestyle. What they do well is engage the user from the start and peak enough curiosity to want to continue. Both of these videos have enjoyed moderate success but so have the basement productions.
One such production is “Choose Your Path”. In this third-person CYOA it is up to you to help find Sparta, the missing cat. Excluding the novelty of YouTube Annotations—as I believe this might be one of the first videos to use the feature—it has racked up nearly 1.7 million views. Someone has a soft spot for lost kitties.
The earliest forms of CYOA storytelling that I was able to locate on YouTube comes from our friends down under, Australia. Added on February of 2007, before Annotations was available, Choose Your Own Tube, a sitcom of sorts, used community commenting to vote on what would happen in the next episode. Although voting to see what happens next is a great tool for fostering community growth, the storyline failed to maintain interest throughout and its inability to capitalize on the online generations need for instant gratification led to a dwindling audience. Season one, episode one garnered 70,717 views while season three, episode one netted a significantly lower 9,037 views.
“Survive the Outbreak”, an independent Flash execution, uses a custom Flash player to reveal its narrative. Within this third person “Night of the Living Dead” CYOA it is up to you to make the right decisions to survive. The beauty of the execution of “Survive the Outbreak” is driven by two components. The story starts the viewer off in the thick of the action right from the start and maintains your interest by leading you into tension-driven decisions that result in life or death. The second is the custom Flash player. For users who lack the time or the patience to try all the options, there is a chapter select feature that allows you to navigate back to decision points so you can quickly try alternate options upon failure.
For the iPhone there are several CYOA downloads such as text games and audio books. However, the one that has caught my eye is “Alternate Endings”. In this cinematic CYOA the story revolves around the murder of an unbearably controlling director on the set of a new movie. All of the film’s crew have justifiable motivation to want him dead, it is up to you as Russell the security guard to solve the mystery. What is unique about “Alternate Endings” is that it provides mobile entertainment that gives chase to replay. The story digresses enough with intriguing backstories to motivate the user. The structure provides paths that sometimes return you to previously viewed clips, but the options give enough incentive to continue off onto an entirely unique path without the story falling apart.
The beauty of interactive video and CYOA are their abilities to build community and foster replay, thus increasing time spent with your story. In today’s world of increasingly demanding audiences and marketing budget shifts, it makes sound sense to unite interactive with traditional production to reap the benefits of a long-term investment. Choose your own adventures are not necessarily the be-all-end-all of entertainment. What it provides is a unique story telling platform that engages users to revisit content, ultimately giving reasonable value to viewers to purchase a DVD, download a mobile application or spend more time in front of your brand.
From the YouTube Blog today, comes some great Analytics news. YouTube Insights now offers “Community Engagements” which basically allows you to view where your ratings, comments and favorites are coming from. For those of you who are familiar with Google Analytics, YouTube Insights is a very similar Analytic tool that allows you to track Views, Popularity and Demographics. This helps you get a snapshot of how your videos are doing overall, where the Hot Spots are in your video and where people are dropping off, etc.
Some of you might not have a YouTube account to see what the Insight Tool looks like so we’re posting 2 screens of our YouTube account here:
Summary Page (includes Views, My Videos (% of views), Popularity, and Demographics)
Community Page (includes ratings, comments, favorites)
As you can see from the above examples, Santa’s The One, is not only our most viewed video but also attracts the most community engagement. In fact, our top 6 most “engaged with” videos, were all part of our Interactive Holiday Card video that used Annotations to provide the viewer with a Choose Your Own Adventure Experience. This continues to validate that Choose Your Own Adventure Videos are definitely interacted with by the YouTube community at large and trending in popularity.
The biggest surprise with our YouTube stats? Over a 3-month period, the main demographic viewing our videos is 35-44. So, we’re definitely drawing views from the Baby Boomer set but not necessarily any engagement. However, over the last 30 days, we’re tracking better with the 13-17 demo and have also seen an upswing in our engagement activity. Not necessarily a news flash that Gen Y tends to interact with videos more on YouTube, but good information to be able to track.
The Community Engagement addition is a great tool and will definitely help track future interactions with your YouTube videos. I know we’ll be using it quite a bit. At the very least, it showed what we’ve always suspected – We’re Big in Japan.
Recently I became aware that YouTube updated their annotations feature via an article on TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid. I was excited at first, however I was soon to be let down. Being an interactive director my mind went straight into the potential creative uses. Talk bubbles, notes, pause, linking, sharing, all these features are great when used appropriately with a strategic or creative purpose, annoying when they aren’t.
What I really wanted to find out is would YouTube fix the linking feature to incorporate Flash interactive cue points or something similar. Having used YouTube annotations in the past to create choose your own adventures I have been disappointed by the fact that the page has to refresh in order to continue an interactive narrative path. Hoping the TechCrunch article missed the feature, I decided to upload a test and give it a spin myself.
After testing all the features in the latest update I found myself at a loss. Cool, it’s easier. Cool, new creative tools. However, by not incorporating que points YouTube stains the true interactive experience. Throwing an unwanted, uncontrolled and unnecessary black slate, a digital hiccup, in the users fantasy. Breaking the perceived reality that content creators strive to create, disengaging them, and creating confusion. Until YouTube incorporates cue points interactive content creators will struggle to define the cognitive and affective process by which perceived reality is built. The interactive experience will not be true until the stain is wiped clean.
Sure I will continue to use annotations when warranted. There are some great interactive uses for annotations, and I will continue to explore new ways to use them. I am thankful for the feature. I can even imagine a few creative uses for the hiccup. Just give me the choice. Let creative freedom reign.
Each Holiday season we see a plethora of interactive cards hit the web, advertising agencies, marketing firms, design shops reaching out to their clients and vendors expressing Yuletide cheer. At the top of it, it is about saying “Thanks.” Sure, each agency hopes their creative attempts at a holiday card will gain some traction in the trades; a little PR is always a nice stocking stuffer.
With that said, I’m not reserving this post to praise, discuss or criticize the efforts made by creative teams. After sharing the Zugara Holiday card with our clients on YouTube several people responded with “How did you do that?!!?”
Here goes…
The idea was to use YouTube’s annotations to create an interactive video execution that revolved around Santa and what he does to those on his naughty list. Thus, the viewer would choose whom Santa would take to task on his naughty list. Using five famous scenes from Hollywood films we laid out a narrative path of teacher, enforcer, to rightfully proclaiming him as “the one.” After all, he is, isn’t he?
Identifying five scenes that were recognizable and didn’t present too much compositing work while keeping in line with our narrative was a task in itself.
With only a week to shoot, edit and composite five scenes from five different films we had to put planning front and center of our green screen shot. After reviewing camera angles, camera movement and lighting from the original scenes we prepped Santa. Before each shot we would bring him into our studio, review the original shot, run over any deviations from the original, rehearse blocking, rehearse camera movement and match lighting. Rehearsing blocking, camera movement and matching lighting was imperative to avoiding too many takes and eliminating unnecessary compositing work while having Santa’s emotions and movements translate well with the original scene. We wrapped five scenes in eight hours, time for post.
Being that we shot HD footage with the Panasonic HVX 200, we used Final Cut Pro to log and transfer all the footage.
One thing to note when shooting green screen footage is that it is best to shoot HD over SD if you have the option. HD has more pixels to work with and a wider color space. When it comes to getting a clean key, color information is vital. This is not to say you can’t get a good key with SD, especially if you have Ultimatte’s real-time keyer. However, HD will not only look good, but it will eliminate a lot of your post heartaches. If your only option is SD, make sure to light your green screen evenly and pull your subject as far away from the screen as your shot will allow.
Using Adobe After Effects we brought in the native footage and keyed out the green using Keylight 1.2. With the footage keyed it was time to bring in the original edited scenes and overlay Santa. In some cases we were able to simply cover the subject Santa would be taking the place of, color treat to match the scene and add shadows when necessary. For those shots that Santa did not cover the original actors’ movement we had to composite out the original actor. By exporting a still frame from the original footage we used Adobe Photoshop to remove the actor and create a clean background matte. We imported the matte into After Effects and dropped it behind Santa. In the cases where we had camera movement we either extended the matte size and/or limited our matte to the area that needed to be removed. After applying motion tracking to the matte and or Santa in After Effects we were in business.
The scenes that required interaction with the original actors, such as Chuck Norris and Agent Smith, we used animated masks on the matte and/or Santa to composite Santa into the shot. In the case of Santa stopping the bullets in “The Matrix” scene, we reanimated the bullets in After Effects and applied displacement maps to simulate the original motion stopping effect. After Effects puppet tool or masking a leg from a different shot came in handy for those times when we needed to give Santa’s kicks an extra boost.
With everything in place we did our final color correction and added sound effects. After compressing the footage for YouTube we uploaded the footage and applied annotations.
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
