What would you say if I made the claim that YouTube is badly designed? Now, whatever your response might be, I’ll plainly state that I can’t just make a better YouTube, I’d need just a little more than just a semester to see that project through. What I am able to do is turn my focus towards a specific portion or feature of YouTube and through accumulated expertise, devise a means in which that feature in question can be be executed more effectively.

The unsuspecting victim this year is YouTube’s comment system, IE the easiest and most direct method of contributing ones own thoughts to a video. Let’s think about this system in broad context, in order to voice your thoughts about a specific portion of the video, you have to scroll down, take the frame of the video away from your line of vision and use text to describe, what is essentially a visual medium. YouTube made an early attempt to bring the the video’s frame into the users consideration with the annotations system, but users are still stuck using text to be specific about video. My takeaway from this attempt is that YouTube was close to creating a more commentative system, but it needed just a little more of a shakeup to the formula for the systems efforts to really make an impact. My proposed capstone project is exactly that shakeup in question.

My capstone isn’t what one might refer to as a video upload site, as video isn’t even hosted on the site. Instead, this site hosts stillframes of video and treats each frame page as it’s own unique gallery, and the stillframe itself as a canvas for the user’s creative interest. Instead of text, users are given several image editing tools to help in bringing their observations to form through the use of (tentative:) pencil, filter and fill tools. Once users are done with their contribution, their creation is saved to both the frame’s page and additionally the main page, giving users a sense of the kind of content that is published. When I originally devised the project, I came up with the idea that the site could be used to highlight cinematic elements of video and crowd source the act of rotoscoping (live action animation), but since the project’s unveiling, I’ve heard uses ranging from the possible like tracking animal movement, to the extremely unlikely, like usage in court to analyze video-based evidence.