A few months ago I wrote an app to download my YouTube metadata, and I blogged some statistics about it and some haiku I found in my video titles and descriptions. I also created a few word clouds from the titles and descriptions. In that post, I said:
Next perhaps I’ll make word clouds of my YouTube descriptions from various time periods, to show what I was uploading at the time. […] Eventually, some of the content I create from my YouTube metadata will make it into a YouTube video of its own — perhaps finally a real channel trailer.
Me, two and a third months ago
TL;DR: I made a channel trailer of audiovisual word clouds showing each month of uploads:
It seemed like the only way to do justice to the number and variety of videos I’ve uploaded over the past thirteen years. My channel doesn’t exactly have a content strategy. This is best watched on a large screen with stereo sound, but there is no way you will catch everything anyway. Prepare to be overwhelmed.
Now for the ‘too long; don’t feel obliged to read’ part on how I did it. I’ve uploaded videos in 107 distinct months, so creating a word cloud for each month using wordclouds.com seemed tedious and slow. I looked into web APIs for creating word clouds automatically, and added the code to my app to call them, but then I realised I’d have to sign up for an account, including a payment method, and once I ran out of free word clouds I’d be paying a couple of cents each. That could easily add up to $5 or more if I wanted to try different settings! So obviously I would need to spend many hours programming to avoid that expense.
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it.
Douglas Adams in ‘Last chance to see…’
I searched for free word cloud code in Swift, downloaded the first one I found, and then it was a simple matter of changing it to work on macOS instead of iOS, fixing some alignment issues, getting it to create an image instead of arranging text labels, adding some code to count word frequencies and exclude common English words, giving it colour schemes, background images, and the ability to show smaller words inside characters of other words, getting it to work in 1116 different fonts, export a copy of the cloud to disk at various points during the progress, and also create a straightforward text rendering using the same colour scheme as a word cloud for the intro… before I knew it, I had an app that would automatically create a word cloud from the titles and descriptions of each month’s public uploads, shown over the thumbnail of the most-viewed video from that month, in colour schemes chosen randomly from the ones I’d created in the app, and a different font for each month. I’m not going to submit a pull request; the code is essentially unrecognisable now.
In case any of the thumbnails spark your curiosity, or you just think the trailer was too short and you’d rather watch 107 full videos to get an idea of my channel, here is a playlist of all the videos whose thumbnails are shown in this video:
It’s a mixture of super-popular videos and videos which didn’t have much competition in a given month.
Of course, I needed a soundtrack for my trailer. Music wouldn’t do, because that would reduce my channel trailer to a mere song for anyone who couldn’t see it well. So I wrote some code to make an audio version of each word cloud (or however much of it could fit into five seconds without too many overlapping voices) using the many text-to-speech voices in macOS, with the most common words being spoken louder. I’ll write a separate post about that; I started writing it up here and it got too long.
The handwritten thank you notes at the end were mostly from members of the JoCo Cruise postcard trading club, although one came with a pandemic care package from my current employer. I have regaled people there with various ridiculous stories about my life, and shown them my channel. You’re all most welcome; it’s been fun rewatching the concert videos myself while preparing to upload, and it’s always great to know other people enjoy them too.
I put all the images and sounds together into a video using Final Cut Pro 10.4.8. This was all done on my mid-2014 Retina 15-inch MacBook Pro, Sneuf.
Creative Output 