Hand-drawn video

The most recent E-learning Heroes challenge is all about creating a hand-crafted explainer video.

Now ideally this would have all been done manually, like in the example posted where we set up a camera at a very funny angle and move our cut-out pictures around while narrating the story. But, I (also) cheated (or, like Tracy Carroll, I was ‘resourceful’).

Topic

Without the benefit of time, I decided on an easy topic, and one well-known to me: Friday lunch orders at our school. I should explain for those in other countries, or those who have kids in schools with canteens: my kids’ school has fewer than 100 students……. in total. So, kids bring their own lunch, except on Fridays when the school runs a lunch order program. Volunteer parents take turns cooking meals and dishing them up on Fridays for kids who pay the exorbitant amount of $3.

I created a very basic storyboard to explain the lunch order process to new volunteers.

Cheat #1

As you can see, I’m not a good illustrator… at all. I’m happy to give things a go though; however, my 8-year-old really wants to be an illustrator, and my 7-year-old really likes to draw, so……….. I enlisted their expert hands. I figure I am giving them job skills.

We made a list of objects required and I gave them the option of doing them black and white or colour—with the condition  that all objects had to be either one or the other. We ended up with a list of 17 items. Later on, after deciding I was not going to record voiceover, I created a few speech bubbles myself.

This is what the kids came up with:

Cheat #2

I really did plan on creating the video manually, as in the example posted. But………….

I should point out that after giving the kids instructions and a checklist to cross off each object required, I left them at grandma’s and didn’t see them until the next day. When they came home with their drawings I was really stoked with the result. However, there was one thing I had not taken into account—object size. So, we had some discrepancy. For example, a 4 cm boy and then a 10 cm spoon.

I wasn’t about to make them do it all over again (I want to give them job skills, not put them off work!) so I decided to scan the drawings and create the video with digital/hand-drawn pictures instead.

While I am crazy in love with Storyline, this time I decided to use Camtasia as I have recently purchased it but have not had much of a play yet.

Result

Since each of my kids created a whole set of drawings, I created one video with each set, so without further ado, here are our two hand-drawn explainer videos, enjoy!

7-year-old video

8-year-old video