For many people in the world, it is difficult to imagine what life was like without the World Wide Web. In the last quarter century, the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people across the world access, share, and use information. The Web is increasingly integrating into more and more aspects of our daily lives and work. For example, it has played an important role in empowering citizens with a digital platform for civic engagement, and spreading knowledge on disease prevention to boost global health.
Join us and USAID’s Global Development Lab in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, and the extraordinary opportunities it presents to helping people in the most remote places in the world. Check out this animation video the TechChange creative team produced in partnership with USAID featuring Rajiv Shah, Andy Sisson, Priya Jaisinghani, Sascha Meinrath, Dr. Ndemo, Judy Payne, Ann Mei Chang,and Adam Slote.
In the next several decades where we can expect the expansion of broadband connectivity, cheaper smartphones, the increase in data, and business models that serve more underserved populations, we are hopeful for a future where extreme poverty no longer exists.
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If you’d like more information on TechChange’s animations and our creative team’s work, please email us at info@techchange.org.
In preparation for our new Office Warming Party today, our creative team decorated our office with a special chalkboard mural. Check out our new time-lapse video documenting the creation of our chalk mural here:
Have you ever wanted to learn how to create your own time-lapse video? To learn more about how we created ours, read on to follow the five steps the TechChange creative team took to produce this video:
Step 1: Establish how long you want your final video to be.
We wanted to keep the video short and sweet at 1 minute.
Step 2: Figure out how long your time-lapse will last
Most videos run at between 24-30 frames per second. This means that for 60 seconds of final video, we would need a minimum of 1,440 still shots from the camera in order to fill each frame with a photo (24 frames/second x 60 seconds = 1,440 frames).
Step 3: Estimate how long it will take to film all the action you’re trying to capture.
We needed to make sure that Rachel, Pablo, and Alon would be able to finish in the amount of time that it would take our camera to shoot those 1,440 exposures. If we were to shoot at one-second intervals, our camera would only be running for 24 minutes. Now, our creative team is fast, but not that fast.
By estimating that it would take the team two hours (120 minutes) to complete the chalk mural, we can solve for 1,440* interval = 120 minutes to get that interval = 0.083 minutes, or about 5 seconds between shots.
Step 4: Set up your camera and film
To create the time lapse, we mounted our Panasonic GH3 onto a tripod and set it to take one photo every five seconds for 1,440 shots.
Step 5: Import your still image series into video and edit
After setting the camera to take these exposures, we imported the 1,440 stills into PremierePro by using the option to import an image sequence, rather than as individual stills. This import method is quick and matches one photo to each frame of the video sequence. Lastly, we cropped the video so that it would fill a 16:9 aspect ratio, added music, and edited in the TechChange logo animation.
We’re excited to have one of our top viewed TechChange animated videos featured in The Guardian! Check out our “Why Is It So Hard to Try Something New in ICT4D?” video created by TechChange animator, Pablo Leon, and narrated by Laura Walker Hudson of FrontlineSMS.
To view the video in The Guardian’s Impact and Effectiveness Hub, click here.
I had the great fortune of getting fantastic training/advice/wisdom from the Poptech faculty on the content of my talk as well as other challenges that we’re facing as an organization. Many thanks to Ken Banks, Michael Duarte, Erik Hersman, Cheryl Heller, Peter Durand, Jim Koch, Chloe Holderness, Kevin Starr, Heather Fleming, Grant Tudor, Lisa Witter, Priti Radhakrishnan, Susan Phillips, and the amazing staff at PopTech: Becky, Andrew, Ollie and Leetha. This group was truly an all-star cast of individuals at the forefront of social innovation. Read about them here.
Our Prezi as it appeared for PopTech. Click through and check it out!
After the presentation on Friday, a number of folks asked me about the presentation format. so I decided to share some details about how we made it and the design decisions that went into the process.
1. Unify your presentation with your organizational identity
In telling our story, we didn’t just want to read off bullet-point slides. We wanted to bring the audience into our office and show them what we see. We also wanted to take the most literal skeuomorphic approach to our presentation: a map should be represented by a map, a note by a sticky note, a website by a web page, etc. This was partly on the principle that we had the freedom to create our elements and not use pre-existing photos, but also that it reflects much of the design sense we have used in our online learning products. That unity of experience between our learning design and presentation intent was important to us — what you see is what you get. However, using that framework meant that we had to create depth in two-dimensional infinite canvas while still having believable rectangular frames to zoom into — an effect that we created through a fisheye illustration.
2. Bring your Prezi to Life
Since we had dedicated creative time to this project that is passionate about representing our brand well, we wanted to do a good job, but we didn’t want to overdo it either. We looked around for inspiration and we found a few neat ideas around the internet, which used subtle animated gifs to bring an environment to life. Of course, Prezi required that we used SWF instead of animated gifs, but we could achieve pretty much the same looping effect after we inserted the animations into our Prezi.
3. Get feedback and back up everything
The most valuable part of this project wasn’t just the creative team, but the feedback from other PopTech fellows and faculty about distilling information and pacing it. At the end of the day, Prezi is based on Flash. The same problems that led to us treating it as unreliable three years ago exist today. Naturally, the night before our presentation we were unable to download the presentation. Fortunately, we were able to work offline to rebuild our changes and export them for the presentation. The one saving grace of this experience with Prezi is that their online customer support was right on the ball when their product started having trouble. That’s one thing that we consider vital as we approach 10k followers — not just maintaining a product, but building a community.
I’d like to give a special shout-out to my fellow fellows: Esther, Nicole, Donnel, Emily, Alex, Anushka, Nathaniel, Jessica, and Julia – you all are an inspiration! Grateful for this experience and hope to join for PopTech 2014!
Ever wanted to become a famous voice actor? Now is your chance. Over the next month, we will be holding virtual auditions to find the next Voice of TechChange. The winner of this competition will become the voice of our animations & course modules – an international voice superstar heard by TechChange students drawing from over 100 countries.*
Imagine the unique opportunity to provide the voice for our expertly-crafted animations, such as the one below, on “Why is it so hard to try something new in ICT4D?”
Do you think you (or one of your friends) have what it takes? To enter the competition, follow these three, simple steps. The deadline for entering is August 15.
2. Record, or upload onto your Soundcloud account, a clip of yourself reading this text.
3. Share your audition sound clip via e-mail to info@techchange.org, with the subject: “Audition for the Voice of TechChange – [Your Name]”
After all the audition tapes are in, we will sift through the entries and find the Final Four candidates for the position. We will post these in a follow-up blog post for our readers to vote. The two entrants receiving the most votes will be invited into our offices for in-person auditions this Fall, and then we will crown the Winner of The Voice (of TechChange).
Last Thursday, TechChange was proud to participate in the TechGirls program by inviting two young women from the Middle East to shadow our team during a work day. While we’ve always been committed to tech capacity building in the Middle East, it had been almost two years since we conducted a series of trainings in the West Bank, and we couldn’t pass up a chance to invite future colleagues into our home and share our enthusiasm. According to the State Department, the TechGirls program:
“[P]rovides girls from the Middle East and North Africa with the knowledge and resources to pursue higher education and careers in technology. This program builds on the U.S. global commitment to advance the rights of women and girls around the world.”
Nagham joined us from Nablus, Palestine. She is 16 and started using the computer at the age of 5; and she would like to study IT or Science. Nagham expects to improve her programming and game design skills. Sondos is from Zarqa, Jordan. She is 16 years old and has taken classes in robotics, Visual Basic, Oracle, Invention, Photoshop and HTML and SQL programming. Sondos is especially interested in pursuing technological interests that will aid the field of medicine.
With that in mind, we set up a variety of hands-on workstations that included:
Hands-On Coding and Electronics: Combining Art, Problem-solving, and Circuitry
Python-powered office temperature website
Since both TechGirls were interested in both programming and hardware, we started off with our in-house code ninja, Michael Holachek. Michael is 18, an avid robotics enthusiast, and will be attending MIT in the Fall to study Electrical Engineering. Michael started off with a short discussion about the connection between art and electronics (including a TED talk on painting circuits), introduced some basic programming in C and Python, and then demoed a few cool circuits on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. They then worked together to make a TechChange mood lamp that played the TechChange theme song and display the office temperature on a website. At the end of the session, Sondos and Nagham came up with several ideas for applying these new skills to new problems, including attaching a room thermometer to an Arduino board to trigger an alert if the room became too hot for a baby.
Making Graphic Elements: Generating and Animating TechGirls Avatars
With their new Arduino boards built, both Nagham and Sondos sat down with Pablo Leon and Rachel Roth to try illustrating themselves and then animating their avatars in After Effects. Rachel provided a sketch of our guests and then we loaded them on our custom tablets for illustration. Trying their hands with our stylus, they learned about creating layers, sorting into folders, using filters, etc.
New avatars illustrated by TechGirls!
After they finished creating avatars, Alon Askarov demonstrated how to use the Puppet tool to teach them how create short animations. Given that we were limited by time and that TechChange animations take time (see our blog post on this), these were kept to minimal facial expressions, but we still had fun doing it!
Animated Sondos
Designing a Four-Week Course: A Tour of mHealth
Since Sondos was interested in public health projects, we tried to show off what we’d been working on for our mHealth and maternal health initiatives. We opened up the most recent course that we had built with the UN Foundation on Mobile Phones for Public Health,but rather than the speakers or content, what seemed to be the most interesting was the 161 participants in the course from all around the world. We agree: It is pretty cool.
Student map from our mHealth class
But on top of the novelty, we also chatted about how we believed connecting these students was a core part of online learning — not just transferring knowledge on technology, but building a community of practice. After all, technology is the easy part when it comes to mHealth.
Building Interactive Learning Experiences in Articulate
But a platform isn’t enough for online learning. Catherine Shen discussed how to structure content for educational purposes. This meant walking through the current courses being designed for State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. Catherine used a current course from OTI Lebanon on advocacy for the TechGirls to see the mechanics of course design at work.
The TechGirls then created a short interactive presentation on their TechChange day, integrating their animated avatar with a survey that the girls used to tell us about their experience. Using a Likert scale, the girls gave their impressions of their shadow day.
The results were clear: Both of our participants strongly agreed that the job shadow day was fun and inspiring, in addition to being informative and interactive.
It was for us as well. Thanks to the TechGirls team for joining us!
Thanks TechGirls!
This post was written with contributions from the entire TechChange team. Thanks specifically to Catherine Shen and Michael Holachek for contributions in the sections above.
THE FUTURE IS HERE! But why is it so hard to apply technology to development challenges in the field? This video with Laura Walker Hudson of Social Impact Lab explores this question in more depth, with topics including:
Getting harried aid workers thinking about new ways of doing things.
Making technology work in broader contexts, more sustainably, and aiming for quality outcomes.
Managing the transition from “pilotisis” to “scale-up fever.”
Understanding barriers to progress at an organizational level.
But don’t take our word for it. Check out the video below:
Developed in partnership with the Social Impact Lab Foundation, AES, and PROFOR, this is the second animated video that we’ve done with Laura Walker Hudson (The first was The Power of SMS and Social Change).
As always, we’d love your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below or tweet @TechChange. Thanks!
Thanks to our new partnership with iHeed and Mobento, you can now search for content inside our educational videos, as well as store them on your Android phone for offline use.
Earlier this month, we were excited to announce that our content would be included in the Mobento Global Health Channel as part of a mobile partnership aiming to tackle health in developing countries. While we have made our animated videos and course content available in our own Media Library, we’re grateful for this opportunity to contribute to this new and powerful online video learning platform.
While we’re passionate about creating original video content in our courses, this information-rich format is not easily searchable, meaning that content locked inside has to be manually extracted for use. We’ve tried to get around this by limiting animations to 5-7 minute single-subject clips and then permitting event archives to go considerably longer (and when possible, accompanied by an agenda), but ultimately, video is video.
Well, until now. Thanks to Mobento search, our videos will have search terms identified in spoken words and metadata, and then will show visitors where the search words were spoken in a given video. This will help visitors jump right to the parts that are relevant to their needs, instead of having (for example) to watch an entire two-hour video for the relevant five-minute segment.
But perhaps one of the most exciting things for us here is that Mobento is moving beyond YouTube and other platforms in enabling downloading of the videos through their Android app. So the next time we run our mHealth class and a student asks us how they’re supposed to use the relevant point-of-care video content while out in the field without an internet connection, we’ll have an answer ready.
The end of the year is now upon us. We just wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts and the top of our DC nerd attic for making 2012 our best one yet. Specifically, thanks to your course feedback, content contributions, happy hour attendance, and tuition dollars, we’ve trained over 1,400 participants in 70 countries in how to better use technology for social change.
New Online Courses:
We have expanded on our original set of courses (Emergency Management, Digital Organizing, and Mobiles for International Development) into exciting new spaces. A few courses we’d like to highlight:
(TC309) Mobile Phones and Public Health: Our largest open enrollment course so far, we were joined by over 100 students in 25 countries. Developed in partnership with the UN Foundation’s mHealth Alliance, we also piloted our new in-course tool simulator for D-Tree!
USAID Courses on Mobile Money: Through a custom course for 80 USAID mission staff in 7 countries, we’re helping build development capacity in mobile phones. Next up? Turning this course into a self-paced interactive module to scale the program.
TOL Journalist Training for “Reporting on Education” in E. Europe: Developed in partnership with Transitions Online (TOL), BBC, and The Guardian, we shared our platform with TOL to train 20 journalists over a 2-week period. This was our first course ever with non-TechChange content and external facilitators!
Online-Enabled Public Events:
One of our initiatives this year has been to assist our partners in reaching a larger online audience and to start thinking of all public events as online-first. Events include:
Connecting Grassroots to Government at the Wilson Center: Building on our work for empowering Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs), we took live questions from the online audience during this event. This was one of multiple events at the Wilson Center, which is leading the way in online-enabled events.
Expert Interviews at the mHealth Summit: Since the webcast was already provided, we focused on capturing expert knowledge from the attendees and partners for the mHealth Alliance. Most fun part? Getting pictures of attendees holding their cell phones to show their personal connection with the device.
Site Upgrades and Added Features:
In addition to a few other handy features, we’ve made a few big technical upgrades to our site in the hopes of improving user experience.
Launched a new, responsive TechChange.org! We much of 2011 promoting mobile-first design, so it was a relief to build a fully responsive site in 2012. Try re-sizing it in your browser!
Animating our content voiceovers. We’ve always been big fans of RSA Animate and iheed who produce educational video content, so we tried giving it a go ourselves. What do you think? We’re hoping to do plenty more in 2013.
Video-for-everyone course design. We switched from Ustream to OpenTok in 2012 to try to not just talk at our classes, but have discussions with you. It’s been a bumpy ride, but we’re working at optimizing for every browser and bandwidth.
Field Training and Workshops:
Tech training cannot be done by Internet alone. Here’s a few cases where we rolled up our sleeves and got to teaching the old fashioned way.
Sri Lanka Unites 2012 Future Leaders Conference: We travelled to Sri Lanka for a series of tech workshops and to create a strategy document on tech for organizing. It was a wonderful experience and reminder that technology is no replacement for grassroots mobilizing.
Have you seen our latest video about TC104: Digital Organizing and Open Government?
This may just be a simple ad for our course, but it also showcases a lot of what we can do to create a learning experience through video. We thought we could use this video as a chance to show the process we go through any time we make a video.
Step 1: Conceptualize
The first step to producing any video is developing the content for it. Whether you’re dealing with a fictional narrative or factual documentation, whether your movie is thirty seconds or ninety minutes, the first and most important step will always be figuring out the story that you are telling. We meet as a team – and with clients – to go over in detail exactly what information needs to be conveyed, and we develop a visual narrative around those ideas, drawing on the shared talents of our educators, tech experts, graphic designers, and video producer/editor (me!). From this collaborative process, we develop a script and produce a storyboard of what the final video will roughly look and flow like.
Step 2: Drawing/Filming
Once we have the concept fully fleshed out, we get to work on building the pieces we use for the final video. Our incredibly talented graphic designers draw the different pieces and make adjustments based on feedback; some of these pieces are fairly simple drawings, others are highly detailed and contain multiple frames of action that will ultimately get animated. Additionally, at this stage we produce a high quality audio track of the script, as well as potentially doing any live-action filming that is required (most commonly in front of a green-screen).
Step 3: Animating/Editing
Once we have the pieces made, we begin to assemble them together. Drawings are animated primarily using Adobe After Effects. First basic motions are mapped in time with the audio, and then more complex effects are added, such as sub-compositions/animations, lighting effects, motion effects, or anything else that’s needed. Generally, the animating phase begins while the drawing phase is still underway, so that if any problems arise with our original ideas for the video, we can easily and efficiently make adjustments. For example, in our TC104 video, we decided to flesh out the bike metaphor used near the beginning when the visual narrative around that section seemed weak, and it was a simple matter of drawing a few additional pieces and animating them into place.
Step 4: Revisions
The animation culminates in the production of a rough draft of the final video that is then reviewed first by the entire TechChange team. Here’s the rough draft we produced for TC104:
After any changes, we then go over a revised draft with the client. We carefully weigh their feedback to make a final round of adjustments to the video, and then we are done!
Key Takeaways
There are a few key lessons about this process that are worth highlighting and remembering:
The strength of the concept/story will carry over to the strength of the video. Having a strong script and audio track early in the process makes the whole process smoother.
Producing animations is a collaborative process. The input of experts and clients is extremely valuable, and our creative team is very talented and flexible in working to achieve the strongest possible video. Having multiple perspectives throughout the process is incredibly valuable, because viewers of the final product will have a wide range of perspective, too.
Producing animations is fun! It is an effective and easy way to uniquely convey any information to the entire world!
Hopefully this post has been an insightful look into our process. Please contact us with any questions about our process, or if you’d like us to help you produce videos!
