In my last blog I talked about how we were trying (and failing) to attract loyal KILLER CHIHUAHUA! viewers by grabbing the interest of the typical YouTube viewer and drawing them to our site where we would mercilessly assault their unsuspecting eyes with HUGE NEON Pepsi and Coke and Nike ad banners plastered all over our website.

Ok, I’ll be honest. I’m being a bit dramatic here. We were thinking of just some subtle ads placed here and there to help fund the second season. Nothing too egregious or flamboyant. We wanted to build a core audience who would love our webseries. The last thing we wanted to do was to take advantage of them or make them feel used.

Here was the screencap for our third episode entitled “Cyndi Hates” It wasn’t all that terrible but as far as the flash factor... definitely not HUGE NEON there. Look, just because we weren’t necessarily chasing down mega conglomerates sponsors didn’t mean we didn’t want them to find us. And surely they’d be flexible. Banners didn’t have to be HUGE NEON. We would be flexible. Maybe... small pastel?

But before even small pastel would even happen we had to get some kind of attention, some kind of notice. And maybe, just maybe we weren't attracting viewers because of our dreary dismal screencap situation. We had to change that crappy screencap situation!

And..., like a crazy mad scientist, I analyzed probing into the crevices of YouTube to elucidate the precise mechanism of their mysterious and highly guarded screencap algorithm. It was dirty work. And it wasn't pretty... But, I and I alone, master code breaker, I methodically discovered the chink in YouTube armor! Ha! Broken! Broken, you YouTube bastards! Broken!

(to be honest I just watched a video after I uploaded it and matched it up frame for frame on my editing program. using this technique you could find where the screencap would be plus or minus 5 frames. It was Katy who spent most of the time on photoshop creating our image to show the world.)

It was then just a trivial matter to inject our screen image over one of those screencap time frames. Since the screencap would only have to be 10 frames (so you could cover your bets and make sure YouTube actually picked your chosen image) that wouldn’t be much time. We shot at about 30 frames per second so 10 frames was only 1/3 of a second. Not bad. And it worked! We got our first good screencap!!!

This video (with a pretty damn good screen cap might I say) the bastards at YouTube dispassionately remind me has had a grand total of 894 hits as of today. Bastards...

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