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We set ourselves, or should we say set Leif, our Video Content Manager a little challenge; could we create a website as a video directly in YouTube?

Everyone seems to take for granted that YouTube is a video sharing site, and fail to look deeper. There is more to this platform than meets the eye. Here’s Leif to explain a little more:

“The idea was smilingly simple to start with; use annotated links to different parts of the video that are then paused for the full 5 minutes with the relative information at those points. The next link will then send you to a different point of the video.

Annotations are quite often misused and plonked over video with no real thought of how to incorporate it into the video so its flush and part of it. This would obviously take a bit of forward thinking on how you would shoot or design the video. These aesthetics are important.

The back end functionality in YouTube is a little dodgy when it comes to editing annotations it’s not massively accurate. The timeline is hard to navigate and when you use multiple layers of annotations it can get confusing.

I felt I’d made a bit of a mind bending job for myself after adding 36 annotations and 16 pauses to a one minute fifty second long video. But the end result works well.”

“What we have works and looks like a simple website with animations, sounds, links, video. It’s a working website based in a platform not necessarily designed for that particular purpose.”

Have a play, what do you think?