If America loves anything more than lists, it’s trivia. Evidence: Pop-Up Video.
The ingenious reinvention of old music videos with anecdotal facts is (unless I’m repressing something) the only reason I know the words to most Top 40 Melissa Ethridge songs. The show’s creators, Tad Low and Woody Thompson of Spin the Bottle realized all they needed for a hook was bubbly sound effects and to tell me something about someone that I didn’t even know I wanted to know, but now I’m glad I do (i.e. Robin Wiliams is in the video for Bobby McFarren’s Don’t Worry Be Happy, a 15-year-old Boy Geroge was kicked out of school for dying his hair orange).
In The Truth About Dailymotion Videostars, Spin the Bottle tries to bring the magic of Pop-Up Video to video-sharing site self-promotion. It almost works.
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The shorts showcase snippets from videos from Dailymotion’s Motionmakers peppered with facts that provide context to who and what you’re watching. It’s insidery, but that’s not the problem. It’s too slow.
Content featuring not the super famous can’t afford to drag. The series is a good idea, but Spin the Bottle and Dailymotion would do well to shorten episodes, make them move faster, and give more community members exposure.
Online video producers should also think about creating extra content with some added pop-up. Granted, Tay Zonday probably wasn’t watching VH1 Classic when he thought it’d be a good idea to indicate how he steps “away from the mic to breath in,” but textual information on screen did wonders for his career.
