Over the majority of term two in science class, we have been working on chemistry. More specifically, our atom interaction science videos. In the videos we created we had to show how atoms interact with each other to create different compounds and molecules. We would do this through an animation that would be entertaining and portray the atoms as characters.
The first thing we did for our videos is partner up. It was somewhat random and I ended up being with Robin. The next thing we had to do was brainstorm and get our basic ideas down. Because we wanted our ideas to be good we spent a lot of time on this step. After lots and lots of thought me and him decided to go with a talk show style theme that showed “the life of atoms” we did this because we thought it would do a good job of keeping the audience entertained. In this step we also had to do lots of research on exact the molecules and atoms we were putting in out video. We did this because we wanted our video to be one hundred percent scientifically acurate. Some of the information was hard to find but after some digging, we got some solid information on everything we would need to know in our video.
The next step for us was story boarding and script writing. The script was relatively easy for us because we already had a really concise idea on how we wanted our video to look. Once we wrote that down we moved on to the story boarding. Because it was going to be an animation we decided to make the real characters in the storyboard for the actual video. The story board does a good job of showing what the video itself is going to look like so you can make improvements before before you actually start creating.
After all of the preliminary stages we started actually making the final product. We did the animation in explain everything, it’s a great app for any animation or storytelling because you can edit and record your videos or movies. By using explain everything we could simplify animation a ton and it gave us a huge advantage. After recording all of the separate parts we edited our video together and posted it on YouTube.
Looking back at this project and the experiences that came with it I would definitely say it was a great way to learn about a topic (notably a complicated one) that not everyone is interested in at first glance. If I could do it all over again I think I would leave lots of time for editing and improvements. This is because looking back there are always improvements you can make, big or small. Secondly I would make sure to have everyone do an equal amount of work. At times I felt I was doing to much and it made the process a bit more rushed then it had to be.