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Like everyone else in 2020, we were hunkered down and trying to understand how to live and work in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. We wanted to put our creative skills to work and started to develop a new method for creating animated videos.
At the time, there wasn't a lot of clarity about what to do to stay safe, but three ideas stood out:
Why Masks Matter
Why Social Distancing Matters
What is Contact Tracing?
We decided to explain these ideas in the form of Readable Videos. This way, we could produce them quickly and make them easy to consume in any context. We offered the videos and other materials as free downloads.
Looking back, the videos worked for many and I'm proud of them. Since then, I've learned more about how to make Readable Videos even more polished and professional.
Why Masks Matter
Why Social Distancing Matters
What is Contact Tracing?
One More Thing... Animated GIFs
One of the beautiful things about Readable Videos is that they are small in terms of file size. This makes them easy to share and easy to convert into an animated GIFs that plays anywhere you can upload an image. The gif below is under 0.5mbs:
Readable videos are easy to create and require only free or built-in tools. Learn more about Readable Videos.
I woke up this morning with an idea for Cyber Monday. What if I made a quick and simple Readable Video that explains the history of the term "Cyber"? This video took about 90 minutes to create from start to finish and is intentionally bare-bones.
I'm sharing it here as an animated GIF (157kbs).
caption for image
This kind of video (or gif) can be created by anyone and it's simpler than you think. Our Explainer Academy courses put the power of clear communication, video production, and animation into your hands.
I recently had an idea: what if explainer videos, like we make at Common Craft, were created without a voice-over? What if words and images told the story so that video creators could make them without the hassle of microphones and audio editing? What if videos were more accessible and consumable without speakers or earbuds?
I started experimenting and developed a simple method for making what we call Readable Videos. At the Explainer Academy, we have a free mini-course that teaches the basics of the method. This simple idea makes animated videos MUCH easier to create. Enroll here.
