Creating a Scribe Video: an Overview

For the final assignment, I created a video describing about the process of creating a scribe video. The tool used is Videoscribe.

The goal of the presentation/video is to give an overview of the process of creating a scribe video using Videoscribe.

The target audience are Digital storytelling & New Technology MOOC participants (It is expected that most of them will be teachers or educators).

Here's the video: 

Feedback is welcome. Thanks for viewing.

Script: 

Creating a Scribe Video: an Overview

There’s a saying that everyone has a story to tell, and for the case of educators every educator has a lesson to share. One of the best ways to convey a lesson is through video. In this video I will give an overview of the process of creating a scribe video or a white board animation video using a software called Videoscribe. The desktop version of this software can be downloaded from www.videoscribe.com. It allows a seven day free trial.

Just like any other videos, the process of creating a scribe video begins with a topic and a script. A script is very essential in creating a video. Robin once said, “Without a good script, there will be no good story. Without a good story, there can be no good digital story”,   which in our case is “no good video”.

After writing the script, it’s a good idea if you also create a storyboard. A storyboard is a graphical representation of all of the elements that you want to include in your video. This will help you visualize what the video look like in advance. As soon as you’ve got your storyboard, you can begin working with Videoscribe.

We can add images, text, voiceover, and background music in videoscribe. We can insert pre-animated images from the built-in library or import our own images, which will be automatically transformed into animated images. Although Videoscribe recognizes various image formats, such as JPEG, PNG, or SVG; in my experience, the most-fit image format is SVG. The animated images created from this format looks more realistic that the others. Videoscribe has three types of animation: hand-drawing, move-in, and morph. When used properly, the combination of these three can produce a very unique animated video.

Although Videoscribe offers a variety of fonts that can be used for the text, I prefer using the default font since it looks more realistic. The hands, the color of the fonts, the drawing tools, and the background can also be changed depending on the video projects.

The audio can be added either by recording it directly in Videoscribe, or recorded separately then imported into Videoscribe. Personally, I prefer recording my voiceover separately, because Videoscribe doesn’t have voice-editing features. My favorite tool for recording a voiceover is Audacity, a very handy and free audio-editing program. It can be downloaded from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ .

From the whole process, adding voiceover is the trickiest part. Creating or importing a voiceover is very easy, but syncing it with the visual elements is not. We need to ensure that our audience will receive the visual and audio elements simultaneously. This requires us to go back and forth. Patience is the key here.

If necessary, we can also add background music into the video. We can either use the music tracks from Videoscribe’s music library or add our own music. When using a background music, please try to match it with the mood of the scribe and pick a track that complements your voiceover. Make sure that the volume of the music is adjusted to a proper level so that it does not distract the audience from the voiceover.

The final part of the process is saving the project and exporting the video. The scribe video projects that we’ve created can be saved either on our computers, or on the cloud storage online. Videoscribe offers unlimited cloud storage space for its premium users. The finalized scribe video project can then be exported into movie files, which you can share to your students or audience either online or offline.

I hope that this video can be useful, and encourage you to create unique and engaging videos for your class. Enjoy your scribing!