Deface YouTube Clips Perez Hilton-Style

Every want to scribble a caption on a YouTube video? Japanese web project Rakugaki (“scribbling”) makes it easy to do just that — you don’t have to read Japanese to drop a YouTube URL in the form field on the home page, click “Submit Query,” and be taken to a page where you can annotate video moments a la Mario Lavandeira’s fingerpaint-level visual commentary on celebrity photos at Perez Hilton.

As an ode to the mashup scene, here are my notes on this awesome pileup on the information superhighway between Bob Fosse and UNK, “Walk it Out, Fosse” (via Feliciouslee).

Click to play

According to Tokyomango’s Lisa Katayama, the recently released tool is the work of Satoru Yano, who’s created caption tool Jimaku and Moza Moza Movie, which lets you selectively mosaic blur parts of clips in the style familiar to anyone who’s watched Japanese television. As Katayama points out, if you’re having trouble navigating the site, try running it through a translator such as Google Translate. But the tools themselves are pretty simple.

Some tips for better “scribbles” include hitting pause before you start drawing, and taking multiple passes on a clip. Each drawing will fade after a few seconds of video, and you can adjust the color, size and transparency of the brush to potentially achieve some great effects. When you’re done, you can share a link to your masterpiece or even embed it on your blog. Yes, it’s cheesy, but in the best way possible.

For some other video markup tools, see our previous roundup on Mojiti, Veotag, and BubblePLY.