Develop the Concept

Moving images are unique in the use of multiple information streams (audio, visual and textual) to provide a compelling and immersive educational experience. A moving image can demonstrate the steps in a chemistry experiment, illustrate a physical concept such as gravity, or follow the flight of a bird or the path of an animal through the woods. A video camera can be attached to a telescope to trace meteors shooting across the night sky, or a microscope, to show a single-celled organism dividing into two. A teacher’s lecture can be captured as digital video for students to review before an exam. Motion can be speeded up or slowed down. Studies have shown that the use of videos in education can increase student retention and understanding [1]

Digital video that is readily available for use over the web or on a CD or DVD provides visual illustration to supplement written instructions or text and provides consistency of information to supplement student note taking.

There are many excellent web-based videos available for science education at no cost. Often these videos are included on an educational website that includes educational activities and other multimedia resources. A directory of digital video resources in the sciences is provided elsewhere on this site.

The growth of the consumer and “prosumer” market has provided digital video cameras (camcorders), video editing software, software to share digital video on recordable media (CD-R and DVD-R) and via the web, in a manner that is both cost-effective and fairly easy to learn and employ.

Why create your own video when so many excellent videos are available on the web?

1. Specificity

You can create digital videos that are specific to your lesson or course, for example a chemistry experiment that students will be tested on.

2. Personalization

You can provide tutorials for your students to explain a physics principle or a mathematics problem that students may view over and over, for “virtual tutoring,” at any time.

3. Localization

Digital videos can be created of local events, such as the school science fair or local animals and plants, to engage students more readily in their own environment. Digital video can be used to document local guest lecturers, thus providing information that is not otherwise available.

4. Engagement

Students can actively participate in creating digital videos, thus enforcing the lesson and teaching students effective communication and technical skills.

The disadvantages to creating digital video are that producing high quality videos that you want to share with others can be somewhat expensive and difficult to master. The good news is that producing digital video of reasonable quality is within the grasp of any educator and provides your students with customized information, specific to their needs, bearing your personal touch.

The most important step in creating a digital video is also the least technical: developing the concept.

Step 1. Decide on a concept.

Begin by deciding on the concept(s) the digital video should illustrate. If at all possible, focus on a single concept or piece of information to share within a single video. Shorter videos are easier to download or stream over the web and easier for students to review multiple times. They are also much easier to create and edit. If you want to illustrate multiple concepts, create multiple videos and list them in order, with text explaining how to view them, on a website.

Examples of concepts:

Illustrate the principle of gravity by filming a rock dropped from a height

Illustrate the principle of gravity upon objects of different mass by filming a feather and a rock dropped from the same height.

Illustrate the stages of water by filming an ice cube melting to water and then brought to a boil on a stove

Illustrate butterfly flight pattern in response to attack by filming a butterfly responding to a waved arm (or a bird decoy)

Step 2. Understand your audience

Is this video intended for a certain age group/educational level or a range of ages/educational levels? The age and educational level will dictate the complexity of the video, as demonstrated by complexity of the concept, the number and complexity of the shots, and the script. Simple videos are easy to understand and to use and can engage a wide variety of audiences. For science videos, less is generally more!

Step 3. Determine the desired outcome(s)

You want to create your video to achieve one or more desired outcomes that can be measured or demonstrated through interactions with your students. Creating science videos, while often fun, is very time-consuming and requires experience to become truly effective. You will want to validate that you have achieved your desired educational outcomes and, if not, to reshoot the video until the outcome(s) are achieved. While the effort to assess your video’s effectiveness takes time and patience, you will be rewarded with a video that you can reuse again and again, and that you can share with educators all over the world, to expand your influence as an educator beyond your immediate classroom.

Sample outcomes:

Illustrate the principle of gravity by filming a rock dropped from a height

Outcome: A student can explain why a rock falls instead of being suspended in mid-air.

Illustrate the principle of gravity upon objects of different mass by filming a feather and a rock dropped from the same height.

Outcome: A student can explain why a feather and a rock fall at different rates of speed.

Illustrate the three stages of water

Outcome one: A student can name the three stages of water

Outcome two: A student knows the right temperatures to create each stage of water

Outcome three: A student can create each of the three stages of water

Illustrate butterfly flight pattern in response to attack by filming a butterfly responding to a waved arm (or a bird decoy)

Outcome one: A student can demonstrate how a butterfly responds to a waving arm by acting out the butterfly flight pattern.

Outcome two: A student can identify a butterfly response to attack by selecting the correct flight pattern from several visual still image samples

Outcome three: A student can explain why a butterfly responds to attack with a random flight pattern, as opposed to flying in a straight line.

Step Four: Write the script

Step four may occur before or after creating the storyboard. Since educators are generally more comfortable with creating text, starting with the script can be a good way to begin. You may feel that you don’t want or need a script, that the visual can speak for itself. However, without a spoken script, visually disabled students will not be able to use the video. A script can also be used to create captions that make the video accessible to hearing impaired students and provide all students with correct spelling for concepts (e.g., gravity, entropy) as well as information that students can easily capture in notes.

The script should be fairly simple and serve to express the concept. It should be designed to illustrate the concept in a manner that results directly in the desired outcome. The script should closely parallel the video shots to provide an integrated video and audio experience for the student. After the script is written in draft, it should be timed to provide an expected duration for each shot.

Step Five: Create a storyboard

Generally, for novice videographers, the initial script will include too much text and overwhelm the visual experience. This occurs because educators are very comfortable with the spoken and written word, while the visual medium is a less familiar mode of communication. A critical tool for designing your video is a storyboard. Adrian Mallon describes a storyboard as “an expression of everything that will be contained in the program.” [2] A storyboard generally looks like a cartoon in that it includes shot images, in order, with captions/scripting synchronized to the shots. Storyboards can be created in a number of ways. The most “low tech” way is to create a storyboard on a large poster, with cut-out images and text. This is a labor-intensive undertaking, and does not lend itself readily to editing.

Low-cost and freely available software to create storyboards is also available, such as Atomic Learning’s Video Storyboard Pro. You can also use a readily-available presentation program that lets you integrate images and text in sequential order, such as Microsoft’s Powerpoint program.

A storyboard will provide the following:

The hardest part of composing a video is to create shots and script that are just the right length. It can be difficult to time a script for a shot that is relatively short in duration. Consider the example of the rock and the feather falling from a height. The rock falls at a fairly fast rate of speed—probably much faster than the explanation. You can address this issue by framing the audio explanation around the most dramatic climaxing shot of the rock and feather falling. The explanation might begin in a framing shot that shows the rock and feather poised to fall. The actual falling might have very few words, so as not to distract from the visual and yet provide some audible information for visually impaired students. The explanation can continue through a replay of the falling experience (“let’s see that again”) which might be in slow motion. Other shots that can illustrate the concept of relative mass might include the rock and the feather each being weighed on a cooking scale and/or measured against a ruler, to demonstrate both relative size and mass.

Step Six: Designing the video

The initial storyboard will help you develop a shot list and key your script to each shot. The next step will be to stage a “dry run” of the video in the environment in which it will occur, using the assembled props. Knowing the environment will also help you determine your lighting and background needs, which are discussed in more detail in the next section. If your digital video camera has a still image capability, you will want to do a first “dry run” by capturing a still image for each shot. If not, you will want to use a still image camera. This will help you determine the order and staging of each shot, which will include setup shots, the actual concept action shot(s), and the explanatory or review shots, which emphasize the illustrated concept. At this point, you may also do a dry run digital video, which allows you to time each shot, or if you do not have the digital camera handy (in the event that you are using borrowed or rented equipment), you can rehearse and time the actual event, without capturing it on digital video. You can practice the narration with the action, but you should also time the script separately to insure that the script and the timing of each act coincide. You are now ready to complete the final draft of your storyboard by plugging in the script (which can eventually become written captions in your video) and the timing, together with actual still images for each shot.

Figure One: Example of a storyboard