I have a client who wants to create something in Storyline that would look like a person interacting with a live YouTube video. In other words, the person would be live on, say, YouTube, discussing a topic, while you could also see all of the live comments coming in like a scrolling chat panel. Has anyone ever built something like this? It's essentially like a Q&A session. I just can't get around how to build this out, particularly in terms of accessibility.
Hi Brandon. This sounds like a tricky but fascinating design challenge! Is the goal for this that the person taking the e-learning course would just be watching the video and "live" comments? Or did they want them to be able to interact with the comments and/or video in some way?
Okay, so I'm envisioning the person taking the course would be watching a video of someone discussing a topic and then taking questions from a made-up chat that is part of the video. I'm starting to think I could screen record this exact thing through Zoom or Teams, where the people supplying the questions were just co-workers and the person conducting the Q&A was an actor working from a script. But I guess I wanted to know if anyone has built something like this using Storyline.
Sounds interesting! Similar to Bianca, I'd be keen to know if they could interact with the video or comments in any way.
If the answer was no, then I'd build the whole thing external to Storyline for ease (for example in Premiere Pro) and have a video of the presenter, and a fake scrolling comments panel to the side, and animate the comments panel in time to the presenter speaking. Then export it as a video and place the whole thing in a storyline slide.
Much more interesting... if we wanted the learner to interact with the video, you could do what I have suggested above but have breaks in the video (maybe the upvote their favourite comment in the scrolling panel, or select which question they would like to ask the presenter, from the choices your provide). Then you have a branching scenario, over several slides, where the choice the learner makes decides what the presenter says next, to give the impression the learner is directly interacting with someone 'live'
I don't think the intent is for the user to actually interact with the content. I know I could probably just use fly-in animations to have a chat window appear when a fake question comes in, but I'm playing around with approaches.
Good to know the concept is something users are just going to watch, not interact with. If that's the case, you could always use cue points in Storyline 360 to animate your on-screen comments boxes so they sync up with what's happening in the video.
But if you need to get this turned around quickly, I think your idea to just act out this scenario in Zoom or Teams with a few colleagues and screen record the whole thing is a smart and fast solution.
6 Replies
Hi Brandon. This sounds like a tricky but fascinating design challenge! Is the goal for this that the person taking the e-learning course would just be watching the video and "live" comments? Or did they want them to be able to interact with the comments and/or video in some way?
Okay, so I'm envisioning the person taking the course would be watching a video of someone discussing a topic and then taking questions from a made-up chat that is part of the video. I'm starting to think I could screen record this exact thing through Zoom or Teams, where the people supplying the questions were just co-workers and the person conducting the Q&A was an actor working from a script. But I guess I wanted to know if anyone has built something like this using Storyline.
Sounds interesting! Similar to Bianca, I'd be keen to know if they could interact with the video or comments in any way.
If the answer was no, then I'd build the whole thing external to Storyline for ease (for example in Premiere Pro) and have a video of the presenter, and a fake scrolling comments panel to the side, and animate the comments panel in time to the presenter speaking. Then export it as a video and place the whole thing in a storyline slide.
Much more interesting... if we wanted the learner to interact with the video, you could do what I have suggested above but have breaks in the video (maybe the upvote their favourite comment in the scrolling panel, or select which question they would like to ask the presenter, from the choices your provide). Then you have a branching scenario, over several slides, where the choice the learner makes decides what the presenter says next, to give the impression the learner is directly interacting with someone 'live'
Hey there, Martin:
I don't think the intent is for the user to actually interact with the content. I know I could probably just use fly-in animations to have a chat window appear when a fake question comes in, but I'm playing around with approaches.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Good to know the concept is something users are just going to watch, not interact with. If that's the case, you could always use cue points in Storyline 360 to animate your on-screen comments boxes so they sync up with what's happening in the video.
But if you need to get this turned around quickly, I think your idea to just act out this scenario in Zoom or Teams with a few colleagues and screen record the whole thing is a smart and fast solution.
Thanks for the feedback, Bianca. I mocked something up in Storyline and it came out pretty well. Just need to get the client's thoughts.