I’m excited about what can be done with video.
Most of our work has a standard video file delivery – that is embedding a video on a website or, a simple video player. So, I jump at the chance to do something a bit more unique.
When developing an identity for our upcoming high-end brand Salt (stay tuned for more info on that) I thought about how we can use video in a different way. With Salt I want to lean towards unique, out of the box approaches to production and I want this to be embodied from the first thing anyone sees when visiting our upcoming website.
To do this I developed the following proof of concept player for our landing page background video.
This is a completely randomised player that will never play the same sequence twice. Click the button above to simulate refreshing the page.
The player is composed of two HTML videos, one in the background and another in front that uses an SVG of the Salt logo as a mask.
Each video is a series of 5 second clips, a mixture of stock and our own examples. It uses a simple script to pull up the length of each video and divide by 5 to calculate the number of clips. Then every 5 seconds It generates a random number between 1 and the number of clips and jumps to that clip in the video.
This isn’t the first interactive player we’ve built
We’ve made a number of bespoke portfolio sites and last year we created Start Something, a choose your own adventure series for The Prince’s Trust.
Start something puts viewers in the shoes of a young person to convey soft employability skills in a fun way.
Users are presented with a number of choices and given a score at the end. We combined dramatised scenes filmed from an actor’s POV with a mixture of animation burned into the video files and images / text placed in HTML to make the experience seamless.
What’s next?
Both of these examples show a taste of what can be done. Start something is obviously an interactive experience and invites viewers on an adventure and the Salt player is a little more subtle. I doubt viewers will notice the interactivity consciously but they will be taken on a journey through an ever-changing hypnotic sequence of unique images.
These each present exciting avenues for exploration so if you’re considering your next video project make sure to also have a think about how you want to show it off, is it just a linear film or could it be something more?
