Nicola D'Agostino (.net) - Articoli, traduzioni, grafica, web

Notes on annotating a video on YouTube

In the last months I have been working on and off on a piece for MusicBlob about musicians using a pedal sampler in their live performances.

A substantial part of my work was not just writing the text but thinking about and then providing and preparing a clear visual example of the mentioned techniques. I’ve chosen to do it using YouTube annotations.

First of all I have extracted and then uploaded to YouTube a short excerpt of a 2002 video of Canadian turntablist extraordinaire A-Trak.
Then I proceeded to add annotations and visual cues to the first 40 seconds or so of the video.

My goal was to signal and underline the key moments of the artist’s work with the sampler when he’s layering his live selections and scratching.
To do this I have used two of the available tools on YouTube: the “Spotlights” and “Pauses” features.

YouTube - Annotating A-Trak

With the first tool I have tried to point out A-Trak’s starting and stopping of the pedal/strong sampler and then his stopping of the motor of the turntable.

The Spotlight feature is a very discrete way of signalling something has happened and also putting a rounde rectangle which points out (or ‘spotlights’) a detail.
Actually it is so discrete that if you don’t keep very close attention you could miss the spotlight cues.
I decided to avoid this potential problem by also adding two pauses which put the video reproduction on hold for a choosen amount of time.

I have used the Pause feature to show the end of the first and second loop selections, just after the pression of the pedal and the stopping of turntable. Also: the lenght of the pause was set to five seconds and not just one or two to emphasize it a bit and to make it possibile that there would be enough time to point out and comment on what’s happening if I ever do a live talk.

Here’s the video I’m talking about with my aforementioned annotations:

Note please make sure the annotations screen icon is selected (red, not grey) in the far right menu