Weaving Text and Video into a “YouTube Storyboard”

Just got through putting together an interesting doohickey that you kids might enjoy — the communications folks at my day job shot some video clips last week for use on TV, and we decided to package them along with text into a little persuasive presentation online. The result: what our video vendor described as a “YouTube storyboard” when he saw it.

Rather than put up a long (boring) video news release, we broke out the interesting clips (soundbites and graphics) and embedded them in a page interspersed with text that leads people through the issue (automobile fuel economy standards). We basically leveraged the strengths of text (in-depth information, search-engine friendliness, easy skimming for readers) AND the strengths of video (strong visuals, emotional impact). The result is almost a web version of a TV news story, but with user interaction, since people can choose easily which parts to watch or read and which to skip. We’re also trying to get the most out of YouTube hosting by including a carefully worded title and description for each clip, by varying keywords and by including a link back to the main site. Of course, we wouldn’t mind a bit if anyone chose to embed the clips on their own sites.

This presentation isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, but it does pack a lot of information into a small space using video that’s in digestible chunks and that can be spread across the web. Check it out and see what you think.

– cpd