Blog

YouTube lets you annotate over your videos – which is sort of like pop-up video on VH-1. Remember that? Hmm, how can we take something someone’s supposed to watch and make it unwatchable? Let’s add lots of small bubbles of text over it. Good idea.

http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about

Point I’m making is YouTube and many other new ventures in web video are launching all these creative little quirky features to let you spruce up your video by adding text, or re-editing etc. Now here’s what strikes me as odd. Instead of coming up with new ways of encouraging people to pay less attention to the video their watching, why don’t we encourage people to make better videos?

There are countless new sites popping up with fresh web content and like regular ol’ TV, some of it is great and some of it is crap. But at least it’s out there and we can seek it out and watch it. Hurray for watching a show the way it’s made.

So, look, it’s late. It’s Sunday. I guess I spend so much of my days working on the best ways to deliver good content for either fun times or to market a product (and yes, sometimes both) and I can’t help but feel like all the developers out there who are looking for the way to revolutionize web video don’t realize the answer already exists, and I, dear friends, will impart this to you gratis. Write good scripts, think out your shots, edit wisely and learn how to compress video for the web.

There ya go, some more wisdom laid on ya from your pals at Big Teeth Productions.

From time to time I’ll use this space to show off some of our work and our clients. We’re proud of all (or most) of the work we do but sometimes you just really connect on a personal level with certain projects, a great plus of self-employment. One such example is Misericordia. Misericordia is a facility in Chicago that houses several hundred mentally and physically disabled people ranging from very high functioning adults who work in the community, to those who need assistence in even the simplest movements.

Rather than go on further about Misericordia, if you’re interested take a look at the video we created with them. It’s a little long for the web, but was really created to be shown at the Chicago Auto Show First Look for Charity. If the video moves you at all, or you’re looking for a great place to volunteer I can’t recommend this place enough. The residents, staff and volunteers all share the same enthusiasm for what Misericordia does – treat each individual with the dignity and respect that they deserve. There’s much more to say, but we hope the video goes a long way at actually showing how it feels to spend time there. We are also working with them to take some of the many many great aspects of the organization and break them down into smaller more web friendly videos… so stay tuned for that.