Island & Choice Settings

How do I make a button that links to a web page or product?

Choose External URL from the “Links To” pulldown menu in the sidebar (see picture below).

Add a link and tick the box to say whether you want the link to open in another tab. If you are embedding the video, choose this.

You can use any kind of URL to a web page, PDF document, social media account, etc.

For instance, you can just link to a regular web page like https://www.stornaway.io/examples

Other examples of URLs you could link to:

Social media platforms allow you to create a URL with the message pre-written (e.g. this link – see more details in the “How do I share to social media” question, below).
Use mailto: before an email address (eg mailto:hello@stornaway.io) to make it open a new email to that address.
Some e-commerce platforms (like Shopify) allow you to specify a product with an Add To Cart command in the URL. Some need you to set this up.

How do I change the play button color and remove the Stornaway logo?

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In your project settings via Settings > Edit Project, Premium users can see settings which let them change the colour of the player controls and remove the logo at the bottom right of the player controls. See picture below.

To upgrade your plan, click the Top right menu > Subscription > Change Plans, or contact us.

NB this is the logo at bottom right, not the Watermark logo at top left of the video – that is only shown for Trial and Free users, and disappears when you subscribe.

White labelling settings for Premium users

How do I create invisible clickable hotspots?

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Invisible clickable hotspots can be created in the same locations as our buttons. These will let you design graphic/animated buttons in your video. You can then make that part of the frame clickable in Stornaway.

This also lets you create clickable areas, people or objects in your video – like the dog with the bone in the demo video on our home page.

Another example would be using a split screen hotspot to make each of these three people clickable. Or see the example of animated buttons at the bottom of the page.

How to make clickable video hotspots

To create a clickable hotspot in your interactive video, choose “Hide the text to create hotspot” in the sidebar of a Story Island.

Our recommendation for starting with clickable hotspots:
Most people arrange their buttons left-to-right on screen. For this, we recommend you use the Left-right Split style with Central Text and Area Overlay.

This will divide the screen left to right into as many choices as you have.

This means that if you have 2 choices, the screen will be split vertically into 2 clickable areas. The left side will be an invisible clickable area for Choice i, and the right side will be an invisible clickable area for Choice ii.

If you have 3 choices, the screen will be split vertically into thirds – Left for Choice i, Middle for Choice ii and Right for Choice iii.

And if you have 4 choices, the screen will be split vertically into quarters in the same way.

For Top-bottom choices, you can choose the Top-bottom Split style.

And to split your screen into 4 quarters, you can choose the Quadrant split screen style – the trick with this is to remember to choose a Location (eg Top-left) for each of the choices.

Below is an example video that’s been made with animated graphic buttons created in the video itself in Premiere. Invisible clickable hotspots have been created over the top of the buttons and cassettes using Stornaway.

When a cassette is clicked, the next island’s video starts, making it seem that clicking the cassette has triggered the person in the video to select that tape.

This video is silent, but creators often use a sound at the beginning of the next island to add extra feedback to the button being clicked.

If you have any questions or suggestions about this, please let us know at support@stornaway.io

How do I start playing from any island, not just the start?

Yes! Play from here is your friend. You can find it near the top of the Sidebar for every island and tab, just under Name and Description.

When you have published your story, there’s a Public URL for every island – you can find it just next to ‘Play from here’ in the sidebar. This is a link to that specific island, so you can provide links that let viewers jump straight to an island.

This lets you share an individual island on social media, or make a list of links on a web page or create a playable visual map of your story (see our example here)

How do I make the Stornaway.io player wait until a user makes a choice instead of automatically moving on?

Choose ‘Pause at end‘ in the styling section in the sidebar (see picture).

This will freeze frame on the last frame of the video file you upload, and wait for the user to make a choice.

Another way to do this is to create a separate ‘menu screen‘ with a still or moving image:

To make a still image menu, create a separate island for the menu, and upload a still image as the island’s Poster Image.
To make a moving image menu, create a separate island for the menu, and upload a video to it. Then make one of the island’s choices to loop back to the start of the same island itself, set it as default, and hide that choice by ticking “Hide” next to its onscreen text field. The island will then loop until someone makes one of the other choices.

Pause At End

How does the Either/Or game logic work for alternative paths?

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Either/or is a simple form of game logic that lets you create alternative paths for viewers, depending on what they have seen before.

So a simple use for this would be a story where the viewer makes either a good or a bad choice at the start of a story. And then at the end of the story, you show them a good ending if they chose wisely and a bad ending if they chose poorly.

Stornaway does this by checking back to see which islands the viewer has watched and then forking the viewer’s path according to your settings.

We kept it simple to begin with to maximise compatibility with different systems. Creators are using it for quite sophisticated combinations of personality tests and game logic.

You can have up to 6 islands linked from a single choice. We will be adding more variables and game logic soon.

EXAMPLE (with screenshots below)

In the above example of a good/bad choice, you might start with Island A1 linking to 2 islands: B1 (a bad choice: take the knife) and C1 (a good choice: don’t take the knife).

Then at the end, you can add an either/or condition to a button, which says:

EITHER

Link to: X1 (Bad ending – police station)

If the viewer has watched: B1 (Bad choice – take the knife)

If the viewer has more recently watched C1 (Good choice – don’t take the knife)
then Link to Y1 (Good ending – movie marathon)

The reason it’s phrased “more recently” is because viewers often watch more than once – so they might have chosen to see both B1 and C1 on different viewings, and the player checks which one they have seen on this playthrough.

If the player has seen neither B1 or C1, Stornaway would show them the first link listed here (X1) – but in this case, they will definitely have seen either one or the other.

Either Or Game Logic for Interactive Video 2

How do I make a button that shares a message to social media?

Choose External URL from the “Links To” pulldown menu in the sidebar (see picture below).

Enter a link using one of the pre-written message formats listed below for Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Tick the box to say whether you want the link to open in another tab (If you are embedding your project, set it to open in a new tab).

To create a pre-written Tweet with a custom message, use the format:

http://twitter.com/share?text=your+words+separated+by+plus&url=yoururlhere&hashtags=yourhashtag

For example this link creates a Twitter post that says, “Get started with the amazing Stornaway” and includes a link to the video with #interactivefilm as a hashtag.

(There should be no line break in the link, even if the browser is showing you one here)

Facebook and LinkedIn no longer allow the pre-writing of custom messages the way Twitter does.

To create a pre-written Facebook post, use the format:

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=yoururlhere

For example, this link creates a Facebook post that autofills the image and link to your story.

To create a pre-written LinkedIn post, use the format:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=yoururlhere

For example, this link creates a LinkedIn post that autofills the video player.

How do I make interactive 360º videos in Stornaway?

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360 Settings:
Stornaway.io creators can add 360º videos to their stories and link them up using on screen links to create interactive experiences that are even more immersive..

360 videos should be 2:1 width to height ratio, rather than regular 16:9.

The files that come out of a 360 camera like an Insta 360 are huge – both in their height & width resolution and in the amount of data they use.

For Stornaway, we need to stream these files to people all over the world with different internet connection speeds and data costs, so we need to be very efficient about the balance of quality and file size so that the files will stream and it won’t cost too much.

So we compared notes with other streamers and chose a balanced resolution and file size of 3840×1920 and a data rate quality of 14 megabits per second.

Stornaway currently has an upload limit of 500MB per clip (for all sorts of good reasons) which is about 5 minutes at this data rate of 14 megabits per second. 5 minutes is usually more than enough for an interactive clip – but if you want longer, there’s a way to join up longer clips described below.

The next question is, do you want to take clips direct from your camera app into Stornaway, or do you want to put them into a video editing app like Premiere or Final Cut first?

If you’re taking it out of the camera app into Stornaway, you should export it at the above settings of 3840×1920, and 14 megabits per second. If you want to take it into an editing app first, then you should export it from your camera app at the original resolution to keep the quality highest in your editing app and improve flexibility for later – and then when your edit is done, you should export from your editing app using the Stornaway settings of 3840×1920, 14 megabits per second.

If you’re planning to upload to YouTube or to take your files into our Unity plugin to make into an app, then you might want to think about making the bitrate higher in the files you upload – we have more about that in our Help section.

Stornaway.io creators can now add 360º videos to their stories and link them up using on screen links to create interactive experiences that are even more immersive.

Your story can be entirely 360, or a mix of different media. Each Story Island is its own unique section. You can link from 360º to regular 16:9 video and stills in different story islands, and it will all flow on seamlessly. They all show with the Stornaway links you know and love.

How do I add subtitles in Stornaway?

There’s not a subtitle layer yet because we were conscious about possible conflicts between subtitles and clickable buttons, and compatibility with third party systems.

Now we have our Unity plugin up and running for export to apps, we’ll be building subtitles into islands in a future release.

In the meantime, the way people have been doing it is burning subtitles into the video files using a video editor like Adobe Premiere or an online automatic transcription & subtitling tool – we recommend Veed.io as excellent for voice recognition and translation.

Create subtitled versions for each island video, with subtitles positioned how you want them.

Then you can make a copy of the project and upload subtitled versions to the islands in the copied project.

To copy a project, in the Stornaway Dashboard, click the menu arrow on a project’s thumbnail and select Duplicate from the dropdown menu. It will copy without media attached to the islands, so you can upload your new video versions to each island.

You can then publish that subtitled project and offer a link to it – you could included this link at the start of another project by using an External URL link, which links to the published URL for the subtitled project.