I’m constantly amazed at some of the videos I come across that are made by non-scientists about scientific topics but are head and shoulders above the typical “science communication” video in terms of quality and attractiveness to the general public.
In this post, I’d like to point you to one of these inspirational videos…partly to show you what’s possible to accomplish with a video that’s only 3:44 minutes long. The video was done by Cristóbal Vila, a 3D illustrator and animator. It’s about mathematical relationships in nature. There is no voice-over explaining anything, but the concepts are crystal clear. It’s been viewed 2,356,483 times, which gives some idea of the impact it has had.
You should be curious about it by now, so take a look:
As I said, pretty amazing. Now, I don’t expect us (scientists) to be able to create something this technically challenging by ourselves. Vila is a professional animator with years of training and experience. However, we can learn something from his video that we can apply to our videos to make them more appealing to viewers. What are the key features that set this video apart?
1. The video is short, less than three and a half minutes in length.
2. The information is all visual and understandable by any culture.
3. The video keeps adding information at a steady, relatively rapid pace (but feels like the information is being leisurely unveiled).
4. There is constant motion going on throughout the video; numbers appearing and disappearing; lines being drawn that are also glowing; objects rotating and spiraling around; things transforming from lines to become organisms; sunflowers and dragonflies waving in the breeze.
5. Colors are intense and dramatic.
6. The text is minimal; only what is essential to understanding the mathematical relationships.
7. There is a dream-like quality about the video.
8. The video elicits an emotional reaction in the viewer, largely driven by the music, which is compelling and carefully keyed to the visual shifts.
9. All visual and audio components are rendered to the highest quality possible.
10. There is no traditional beginning, middle, and end, although there are three main components represented by the nautilus, the sunflower, and the dragonfly animations.
These are the ones that seem most obvious to me. You may see some others. The characteristics that I think are the most critical, that determine the viewer’s satisfaction are #1, 3, 4, and 8.
In the next posts, I’ll take a closer look at these characteristics and offer some other examples of how to incorporate these features into your videos.