Hey everybody. Today Karen and I are here to address another question that i asked in
this recent paper that i wrote and the question for today is what are some key ingredients
to making a a good science video? And i'll throw it first out to karen karen what what
say what do you think is the most if you had to pick one key ingredient what would you start with
well i know i know in your paper that um that you mentioned several good ideas such as avoiding
jargon using interesting visuals using analogies to explain a scientific concept and and then to
promote your video and social media and i thought you know those those were all great comments that
and and we're going to list those in the description below the video but what i'd like to
to focus in on and and emphasize that i think it's key and that is your video needs to tell a story
i mean what do you think i agree 100 uh story so in in in my paper
if you've seen the title of it uh this is for the viewers i know karen you've seen it but one of the
words in there is ice cream and it's probably the only time i will use ice cream in the title of uh
you know one of my scientific papers for me the ice cream part
of that um of that of that title has to do with story and uh story is so critical to
how we think as humans you know we narrative structure having some kind of uh
some tension in there and some resolution uh some introduction that's all part of um storytelling
and i think that makes for a much better uh presentation if you're doing it live or or video
and i think people remember stories better than they remember facts and figures yeah they do
um i often enjoy when i'm listening to a sign you know i'm at a conference somewhere
and somebody starts off with let me tell you a story you know right away you know my ear perks
up and i'm ready to listen because i i know this is kind of may go somewhere interesting
yeah i know when i first started making videos i i didn't understand the power of story and i
didn't understand that i really needed to tell a story in my videos and uh but then but then later
i realized that i should do that and that it was not that difficult you know for example you could
start out by by saying in your video we observed a problem we investigated it what did we find
watch the rest of the video to find out and it's especially easy to tell a story if you do feel
work you can talk about the challenges that you had getting to your field site or some things that
happened along the way your boat broke down or the weather was bad or something like that and then
you talk about the project that you are conducting and what you hope to get out of that project
yeah and you know there's there's a lot quite a few scientific articles talking about the
importance of story and science presentations um fact we can we can include a link to some
of those uh you know in the video description i've actually got a video where i talk about
um i list a whole bunch of papers i i list your your book there karen the scientist videographer
as a good resource but in that in that other video which i'll put a link we can put a link in the
video description there are several papers that specifically again and again and again say try to
get story in your science presentations and video is no different from that so so you know what what
are some other um some other big key ingredients that you think are important i've got a few but i
want to hear some of yours first well still still sticking with the story but um what i see works
is not to not to present your information in a linear fashion the way you would in a presentation
starting with an introduction methods and so forth start in the middle for example you know you would
talk about something that happened to you in the middle of your research and then and that hooks
the viewer into watching your video and then you go back and explain what your project is about why
it's important and and then some more about what what your research is revealing a key to a good
presentation is a hook something that's gonna you know i've i've i've said this prior and i've read
it somewhere else you want people to find your video you wanted to click on it and then you
wanted to stick with you through that as you're you know describing whatever you're telling about
one of the things i think is really important in science videos is a kind of a key ingredient
is smiling and showing enthusiasm you know showing that you are a human and that you um
you're passionate about what you're doing i think that's so important uh we don't want to
have the there's a lot of stereotypes out there of the scientist and the white you know the white
coat and uh very stodgy and uh you know there's all kinds of stereotypes we need to throw out
i i should interject though that as scientists we're trained to be serious you know when you
give a presentation to an international audience of world-renowned scientists
you have to act serious and be serious and um and it's hard to it's hard to break out of that
mold when you're doing a video but but but i think you can be serious and i mean you can be
um approachable and and um sure and and still be serious right and that that's yeah that i guess
that's what i'm kind of thinking is there's ways to show the seriousness of our research with our
presentations or videos without being um monotone i i i try to um sometimes put in some humor
in my videos but i also want to be careful not to overdo it you know that you know
i don't want them to be too corny but maybe just slightly corny or goofy i think another
key element of a good video is visual diversity so you know that be that you're talking head
or pictures you're showing or graphs you're showing or
video clips uh i think it's really really key important for people to realize video is a visual
media and and the way to make it really work is to have a lot of diversity in your in your
visuals you know when you watch a short advertisement
you know they hit you with all kinds of visuals and you get it within 15 seconds or less sometimes
we're not trying to do that but i still think we can as scientists look at some of those other
things that are done by the professionals and hopefully learn from them and and try to bring
some of that um into our videos it's it's it's a challenge but it's a fun part of it actually
yeah and along with the visuals is the idea of keeping things moving and so what i try to do is
i try to change the visual or the perspective at least every 10 seconds if not sooner
it might be a zoom out or a zoom in or it might be a different perspective or it might be a cutaway
to show what the person is talking about or something of that that nature and even if you cut
away to a still image you can apply in many movie editing applications you can apply a ken burns
effect so that the image is actually slowly moving and that makes it fit in very well with uh footage
yeah i i do a lot of that in fact i would say most of my videos have more
still images or pictures than they do video clips and yeah panning across something or
zooming in on one part of it that's the area of of interest and then maybe even having a
circle annotation or come across that those are all things to help kind of guide the reader along
and keep them visually engaged and wondering what's coming next right well here's here's a
an exercise or a homework tip or something that you might want to give a give this a try so
and this is hopefully going to make you realize how easy it is or relatively simple to start
making videos so what i would do is take a paper that you that you've written and got published
that's one of your favorites and take the abstract of that let's just say it's 250 words
and um make a short video you know two to three minutes that uses that abstract text as the script
for your video and so all you're gonna do is either do uh you know you could read it off uh
look it into a camera or you could even just do a voiceover reading it off but basically your your
job is to using some kind of a video editor the one i use is camtasia what's the one you use karen
again i've used imovie and screenflow and there there's some other there's some other apps so it
doesn't really matter what what what app you're using but you could use some video editor and
as your um take that that abstract and add visuals that will basically complement what your words say
if the word rhinoceros shows up show a picture of rhinoceros or but basically try to make your your
um your short two to three minute video as visually interesting as possible using graphs
using photographs your own body moving around and talking smiling or whatever video clips
whatever you think would make that more visually interesting than if it was just read off without
anything and i guess i guess if they haven't published they could just take a paper a favorite
paper that someone else has written and use use that as practice sure yeah that sounds good
and you know one other thing i was going to throw out there is i made a video tutorial of
a real simple method to do this uh which i will we can put a description in the in the video
description there it's what i call the hay roll p-roll method it's where i just line all those
images up on a powerpoint presentation in certain parts of the presentation i'm on screen in other
parts i'm pointing at things i'm not on screen and i'm pointing at things with my pointer of my mouse
it's a real simple method um to make a pretty visually interesting video quickly
without a lot of complicated editing so that might be one that you try out
well so i guess to wrap up we've provided some ideas for key ingredients to make a successful
video but i think we're both in agreement that one of the more
important ingredients is telling a story yeah agreed definitely true so important
um yeah that's something that's it takes training and practice but it's it's a fun part of it