Some of you probably know Leva Lee the past coordinator for the BC Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG). We worked together on a website to support ETUG along with Hilda Anggraeni, a very talented co-op student from SFU. Here's an explainer video Hilda created and Leva narrated to help ETUG members get going with the website. The quality of the audio is a little wonky! Somewhere I have photographs of the process but essentially we used still shots and video of hand-drawn images, including moving these items around on a table.
https://youtu.be/kzNOTtTqYjQ
This was a collaborative project and it strikes me that is the best way to approach explainer videos! In order to communicate and refine our ideas we needed ways of holding the work in common view. We used a wiki to prepare the script together, and Hilda sketched out the storyboard (attached).
I have lots of notes from the project but some that I found interesting were related to our transition to a more informal and personable approach:
- Use of personas
- Instead of "members do this and that" use actual names
- Rehearse the script - does it sound like something you would actually say? We started off with this sentence "The Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) is a community of BC post-secondary educational practitioners focused on the ways in which learning and teaching can be enhanced through technology" but realized very quickly no, that's not how we speak!
- Keep it informal. For example,
"We've been around since 1994 (flash to timeline), probably before you even had a web browser..." instead of "ETUG has been in existence since 1994..."
"Look, here's what people are blogging about" instead of "This area displays individual member blogs"... - Focus on what people can DO, rather than what everything is
Anyway, I thought I'd share some tidbits from that project. We sure had fun doing it!