Reflection Day 4

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Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.

Instructor: Ceri Riley

Talking about visual learning and the importance of storyboarding. Also if anyone needs (rudimentary) animation help, let me know!

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

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STUDENT: So I really appreciated today's lecture and meeting the guys from Planet Nutshell, partially because I'm really a visual learner. And historically that's been true-- if there's an image or an animation or something associated with a concept, then I remember it a lot better.

But I'm also really a visual explainer of things. I took a lot of art classes growing up. I used to draw for fun all the time. And if there is something that I can express by drawing in addition to words, then it usually comes out better than if I'm just rambling on. But that's a personal thing to work on as well.

Regarding animation-y things, I have very, very, very little experience with Flash. I've watched tutorials. I haven't experimented it with myself. But I would be willing to learn if people would like to learn alongside me or had an interest in utilizing it. Because then I could learn it and troubleshoot if you guys have questions.

But on the flip side of that, I'm currently learning how to do animation using Adobe software from one of the people I'm working with on MITx, the molecular biology course. And that's just a really simple workflow from creating vector art in Adobe Illustrator, importing into Adobe After Effects for the animation part, and then importing that into Premiere, which is where I do all my video editing as opposed to importing back in After Effects, for example.

So if you guys are curious about very, very simple things, anything that can be drawn with vectors or solid shapes and moving those around the screen, I can definitely show you what I know about that and how to apply it to your videos. Normally, I use it for-- if you need to animate a protein moving, or you want text in the shape of your handwriting to appear on the screen as though you were writing it, things like that, which can be cool. For me, they're a lot more for the explaining type videos, like what is the cell cycle as opposed to the videos that you guys are making, the Science Out Loud type videos, the style of videos that we're making in class. But you may find a use for it, and I'd be willing to help.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was my own bad habits regarding storyboarding. Even though I'm a very visual person, a lot of my intro into the video making world was through vlogs-- like daily vlogs or channels where people just talk to a camera. And it may be scripted, but it's ultimately them talking to a camera. And these did not have varied backgrounds.

Sometimes, they had varied shots for comedic timing or had little sketches within it. But I never thought about storyboarding when I first made videos. And so it's my really bad habit to leave it out. It would be probably the last thing on my mind when it comes to making a video, which is a really crappy habit when you're trying to make a video like this where it can be really complicated with a lot of visuals. And so I'm trying to break that right now, especially with my other video projects where a lot of them are animation.

And it's so, so important to have an idea of what you're going to draw, what's going to be on screen at every single moment when it's not something as simple as one of these daily reflections where I'm just talking to a camera. I have some talking points written down, but mostly, it's free form. And people are watching it, if you watch it, for the content, the verbal content and the haphazardness of it as opposed to the produced video.

So I don't know. It was really humbling to see people who draw so well for a living, and storyboard and stuff for a living, because I'm interested in the media industry, and it's such a big part of it. But I'm also really lazy when it comes to this part, this really critical part of making produced media as opposed to something casual like this. So everyone has a lot to learn, including myself, and I'm really happy I'm in this class. That's all.

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