YouTube has bundled a new set of tools into its video authoring system that gives you the ability to hack a small degree of interactivity into your videos. The additions won't be interactive in the style of a traditional Flash game or application, which let you do whatever you'd like within a single content window, but they will give you the power to do more with YouTube than you ever thought possible. And in our case, it helped us create a choose-your-own-adventure guide for .
You'll want to come into your YouTube interactive video experience with a game plan. Resist the urge to film your movie off-the-cuff as you do any other YouTube video; treat the project too casually, and you'll be creating extra work for yourself in the long run. Your interactive video can take many forms, but our directions assume that you'll be creating a "click here to do something" kind of movie.
Creating an outline for your interactive movie is the surest way to avoid unnecessary work. Think of the plan for your film as a giant flowchart: Clip A can lead to any number of outcomes--B, C, or D, for example. Regardless of how you decide to organize your video, make sure that you've given yourself the ability to reuse as many clips as possible in your interactive chain.
Although our video is interactive in that it allows users to select their path through the overall narrative, we're still guiding the way using a single batch of videos. The power of YouTube's annotation function is that it allows you to create various pathways through the same batch of videos--basically reusing what you've shot in a bunch of different combinations.
The actual process of filming your YouTube video is no different from how you would normally shoot a piece of footage for the site. If you're aiming for high-quality videos, you'll want to make sure that your can shoot at a resolution of at least 1280 by 720 pixels. And if you want to avoid unpleasant resizing farther down the line, shoot your videos in either 16:9 or 4:3 native format. The former will fill YouTube's widescreen video player perfectly, whereas the latter will force YouTube to introduce black letterbox bars to the sides of your videos.
Finally, be sure that you've thought out the location for the annotations that you'll be adding later to your videos. Shoot your videos with enough room so that the clickable rectangular annotations can appear without overlapping key video elements.
Annotations stay in one place, so don't expect to be able to use them to overlay a critical prop such as a moving car or bouncing ball. Also, annotations can't exist past the length of a YouTube movie. If you want to slap them at the end of your film to give users a choice of new clips to watch, let the camera roll for a good chunk of time after the scene has ended so that viewers have enough time to select their option.
Once you've uploaded all of your videos to YouTube, go into your 'My Videos' page and click on the Annotations button for the video that you want to serve as the main element (and likely the introduction) for your giant project. This single video should contain all the necessary YouTube-searchable elements--a title, description, tags, and so on. The clips you'll be linking to should be named something different and feature no tags of any kind. You want YouTube visitors to find one main video in their searches, after all.
Wait for your video to load fully once you've reached the annotation screen. To make your video interactive, slide the timeline bar to the part of the video where you want your viewers to select how they want the story to unfold. Pause the video and click on the icon in the lower-left corner that looks like a page with a plus sign. Select the annotation that looks like a rectangle with just the corners outlined. Position the box where you want users to be able to click to make their selection.
You can give your link a name that will pop up when users hover over the area, or you can leave it blank. You can also fine-tune the exact moment the box appears and how long it stays on screen, with the time controls to the right of the video window. Once you're satisfied, click on the chain-link icon to the left of the time to add the URL to the next YouTube video you want viewers to see. Repeat this step for all of the "choices" you need to create.
Now that you've created your first interactive link from one video to another, you have all the experience you need to set up as many links as you'd like between all of the videos you've uploaded. Annotating videos is an easy technique, but it's also a powerful tool that gives your users the ability to interact with your video and decide for themselves where they want their experience to go. You can pack as many annotations as you want into a single video, making the potential for interactive exploration truly limitless.
To see annotations at work, view our .