Synchronized Screen Juggling (Hand Reveal)

I've synchronized the motion of 5 balls across 7 videos playing at the same time across 7 devices. Thanks for watching! Subscribe for more chaotic doodles.


Where do I even begin. I always expect complications to arise in my videos, but this one had a lot of hoops to jump through. There were many chains of a problem arising, I create a solution, that solution creates a new problem, etc.

After I finished creating and editing the 7 videos that play simultaneously together, my plan was to just click play on all of them at the same time and shoot the video. I only had 1 phone, and It's too hard to coordinate borrowing 3 phones from people in the middle of the day for long periods of time. Thankfully, my parents and sister let me borrow theirs while they slept one time. I never went to bed that night. By 7am the next morning, I felt dead and utterly defeated. There were so many inconsistencies in the timing that I never got a good take. After vowing to never pull an all nighter again, I bought 3 Android phones so I wouldn’t have to borrow from anyone.

Big issue, SYNCHRONIZATION / TIMING seven youtube videos to play at the same time. Sometimes one of the videos would buffer and set it behind, or there would be a difference in the time from click to playback between different devices. One of my solutions was to download the videos so there was no network inconsistencies. This created new problems because of auto-tilt settings on Android. Another solution I attempted was to attach 5 styluses to a yardstick so I could click play all at the same time instead of trying to use my hands (hard to hit all perfectly by hand). This idea failed as well because the material in the styluses sucked and weren’t consistent in clicking on the phones. Finally, I went back and edited the videos to have a staggered intro. This way I was able to memorize the latency in each individual device and correct for it manually. You know how for the countdown in Mario Kart you hit the gas on 2? It’s similar to that. The right screen started 1 second in because the laptop was old and laggy, the tablet had to be clicked on “1”, and the rest were fairly responsive.

I've made the videos public on a second channel if anyone has access to enough screens and would like to try the challenge:    / @doodlechaos2  

Music: Slip - Geographer

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