Layers of video- Advice for a filmmaker?

I apologize in advance if this post is unclear, but I’m an experimental filmmaker brand new to Unity and trying to make it work for some somewhat strange purposes. I’m fully committed to crawling my way through this and building my own skills, but I’d be a fool not to turn to the community for any potential tips or tricks so I don’t cause myself unneeded angst.

Essentially, what I am trying to do is create an interactive piece in which users can turn layers of video and audio on and off over a base video. (Think if you could stack partially-transparent gifs, animated overlays. Think the way you can turn subtitles on and off, or switch the audio to a different language, if you could turn the dialogue track off, that sort of thing). No camera movement, few-no traditional “game” elements, just a bunch of video and a basic UI.

I’m learning Unity through basic channels but is there anything more specific I should look at? Pitfalls to avoid? Think I’m a total fool working in the wrong program? I feel like I’m in a labyrinth here, any balls of string appreciated.

Well I wouldn’t say your purposes are strange. You can definitely play video files and audio. Turning elements on/off in Unity is easy. Transparency in video might be an issue (I haven’t used it ever in Unity) but seems like there is alpha channel support for some formats (of course format has to support it to begin with). Seems like video also supports global alpha value, so you can fade the image away in addition to having alpha channel in your video.