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Here’s a great application of an artist using online video. Polymer clay artist Judy Dunn has created these great videos on how she makes her polymer clay origami cranes and put them on YouTube.

The videos has been up since March 30th, and they have had over 4,000 views, plus was featured on the Craftzine blog. That’s a whole load of people who have been exposed to Judy’s work through watching the video.

Now while the videos are already great as they stand, here are a few ideas on how she can leverage them further:

1. Show the website URL throughout the entire video. I already do this on the instructional videos I’ve been doing. If you look on the lower right hand corner of the video, you’ll see the address to my blog showing throughout the entire video. This is called a watermark. If you’re using something like iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Vegas Video to edit your videos, you should be able to do this fairly easily. She has the web address to her blog showing at the end of the video, but having it show throughout the whole video will make it more prominent and can lead more people to her website.

2. Put the video on her website & blog. Judy has a blog and whole page on her website dedicated to her polymer peace cranes and the story behind it. The video will make the page even more interesting and will encourage people to stay on the page at least long enough to watch the video. Since the video is on YouTube, it would be amazingly easy to add it to that page. She simply needs to copy the embed code provided by YouTube (that code highlighted in light yellow in the picture below) and paste it on her web page or blog post.

3. Try not to have a multi-part part video. The instructional video is divided up into a part 1 and part 2 which makes it a little disjointed for the viewers. Plus your viewers might not make it to the second video (note that part 2 of Judy’s videos have had significantly less views than part 1). The original video was 16 minutes long according to Judy, but because YouTube has a 10 minute time limit, she had to edit the video into two parts. When you’re planning out your videos, know the limitations and requirements of the video sites that you’re going to post the video on such as:

  • how long (in minutes) your video can be
  • how large of a file size (in megabytes) you video can be
  • any kind of limits as far as content (some video sites don’t allow videos with websites or videos that are like commercials)
  • which video format you can submit (such as Quicktime, Windows Media, or AVI)

4. Post in multiple video sharing sites. One immediate solution for the multi-part video problems is that Judy can also post it to another video sharing site that has a longer time limit. Daily Motion has a 20 minute time limit and blip.tv only has a file size limit of 1GB. Don’t be scared to post your video on more than one video website. That’s another audience that you can introduce your work to. Remember that not everyone is on YouTube and some of the alternative sites also may have features that make it easier to share your video. My favorite video sharing site right now is blip.tv. I find that the video player looks a little more elegant than YouTube’s. Plus it has a great feature where you can also hook your video account up to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, iTunes, Flickr, or to your own blog so that every time you upload a new video, it also posts links to your video to those sites as well.

So…what do you think of Judy’s videos? Go visit her website at http://www.moms-studio.com or visit her blog at http://judydunn.blogspot.com and let her know!