In 2001, I attended an 8-week course called “Say
it on the Web”. We learned much that would be useful for producing
educational video, including how to behave in front of a camera and how
to work with a bluescreen. As a project for this course, I decided to
produce a movie version of a small part of the calculus course, using
both animation and bluescreen.source: course.
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The section shown here was a prototype.
Essentially, the still images of me were placeholders; the completed
version was to have me live as a talking head or in full before a
bluescreened version of the graphics, all edited together with QuickTime
Pro. I did actually tape the bluescreen pieces later, after the course
was over, but there were issues with the audio levels; in any case,
I didn’t like the results well enough to continue.
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The project made me realize, though, that inserting talking heads into
instructional video is probably not a good idea if you want the students
to concentrate on other onscreen happenings at the same time – the
motion of the head becomes a distraction. The intended “personification” of
the video can probably be as effectively produced by the person’s
voice alone. I imported a LiveMath video into QuickTime to animate the
curve. |
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The sound for this one was to be added
later – I wanted to experiment with some visual ideas first.
The main idea was to overlay part of the calculation on a faded version
of the graph it came from, rather than simply jumping to a new page
and then back. The idea comes from information visualization theory:
maintain the context of the calculation while focussing on the calculation
details.
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I also experimented with ways of moving symbols about during a calculation,
including “bouncing” one equation off another to indicate
substituting the first into the second. |
This one is another part of the same
calculation, with more experiments in animating mathematical text.
Note the use of ghosts of moved symbols, to allow comparison between
the before and after states of the calculation.
This animation was produced in Flash. As in the other
movies, parts of the text animations in this one are a bit overdone;
I conducted more restrained and thought out experiments later, in Animating
Algebra. |
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