Prime Video shows you who’s on screen with X-Ray. Netflix lets you save and share a favorite clip with Moments. Apple TV shows you who’s in a scene and what song is playing with InSight.

But what if a character makes a surprising choice near the end, and you want to see how they got there? I wanted a way to watch their scenes in order without dragging through the whole timeline to find each one.

So I built Semantic Scrubbing, a custom Video.js v10 skin that lets you follow a person, object, or type of scene through a film. In the demo, you can watch the character’s appearances in order or watch the tagged shots of Earth from orbit. When you find the moment you were looking for, choose Full Film and keep watching from right there.

Built for the Contra × Mux Video.js Skins Design Challenge. Try it at https://semantic.iexperimentwithai.com/.

Footage from An Ocean in Bloom by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Following a character back through the film is a great feature idea.

Drift: a Video.js v10 skin where the video is a pond

The video sits in a garden pond. Playing, you only see the film. Pause, and the pond comes to life.

Tap anywhere to play or pause. Double-tap a side to skip 10 seconds.

On pause, a leaf falls onto the water, and four carved stones rise: volume, captions, settings, full screen.

A frog on the timeline follows your drag and hops to where you click.

Settings and captions glow on the water. No boxes.

Day, sunset and night, with fireflies after dark.

Works with the keyboard, 44px buttons on phones, readable over bright scenes.

3D pieces made in Blender.

Live: https://drift-pond.vercel.app. Film: Big Buck Bunny, © Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0, streamed via Mux.