 But no one can actually ever tell you exactly how much work goes into it. You know, it's not what you knew you'd be doing that's really a tough. It's the stuff you didn't know you'd be doing the whole time. I think it wasn't until the first day of filming when we saw the crew pull up and all the equipment and the weird old barrel's worth of supplies that just kept coming that we were like, hey, wait a second, this is not exactly what we were expecting. Because there's so many parts moving and people involved that you can't be prepared for it. I think even if I were to do this a second time, there'd probably be things that will pop up. I'm basically a, believe it or not, a shy person. And for me to get up in front of a group of people and a lecture is a little scary. It was just, it was kind of madness. It was organized chaos. And I remember feeling bad for you because you were the one who was in charge. Roll camera, please. Good evening. I guess the main story is an introduction to this organ inside of our skull that defines who we are. It is the one organ that gives us our personality, that helps us navigate the world, helps us understand the world, helps us interact with the world. It defines who we are. It defines our humanity. And it's really that, that I guess is the story. And every single component, every single video is one building block to understanding the whole. This explains why you can hold food or liquid in your mouth and breathe at the same time. And if we laugh about something, we tend to remember it better. The first round of videos was produced in late 2013 and it was actually part of the first flexible learning initiative here at UBC funded through the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund. And so we got this money to flip the classroom and we focused it solely on the neuroanatomy labs. Our eyes kind of lit up and we said, you know, hey Claudia, we can really make this something special. Students have come to believe that, you know, the words educational and video are synonymous with this is going to be really bad. And I want to take them away from that. I want to show them that educational video can be something really compelling and really good. And this seemed to us to be one of our first chances to really make that happen to captivate an audience and to make something that's, you know, a real show instead of, you know, an educational video. And he said, you know, it all needs to fit together and we need to have a certain look. We need to have a certain color palette to go with it. Okay, I was just worried about the content. And one of the unique things that we have here at UBC are medical illustrations that were made in the 50s. And it was from those images that we extracted the entire look of the videos. So the lighting, the way we were dressed, the lecture theater that we chose to film in was like a time capsule from the 60s. At faculty medicine we tend to have people that aren't used to writing video scripts, writing them because they're the subject matter experts. And that's terrific and they bring a wealth of knowledge. But they haven't written a script before and my first piece of advice to them is write it quickly. Write it right away. Don't worry about it. Let's get a quick deadline in and let's finish that script as quickly as possible. And rarely, if ever, does this actually happen because detail oriented people tend to worry about the details. So about six weeks before we were supposed to go to camera we received the scripts which were essentially two to three hundred page PowerPoints, unwatchable and unreadable. And for me the alarm bells went off. Script writing is another thing that we don't usually do. We're basically writing textbooks to be read to the audience. As much as we were talking about we had these lofty goals to be innovative and make it fun and interactive. It was we kind of recreated what we set out to not do. You know we met with the group and what did we do? We had them read the scripts out loud and discovered very quickly that they had not done this before. And when you're reading something out loud you get a sense of how it feels, how it sounds, you know what it's going to be like. It's very different to type something out and think about it. Oh yeah that sounds perfect in my head because I've fixed it, fixed all the problems that might be there. But to hear it out loud as an audience with other people in the room. And I could see by the middle of the second script being read out loud I could see the panic in their eyes and I knew that we had been effective. You can't just do your typical content spiel. You have to make this different and exciting or why should I care, that sort of thing. And we were all kind of like, oh okay how do we do that? We're not used to that. They gave us a template that said what is the person saying and there's the next column, what are they doing? The next column, what is on screen? What are we seeing? What are the actions? And the last column is sort of like what's the point? What are the extra notes? And seeing it kind of compartmentalized in that way changed the way that we wrote the scripts because like oh you can't just have, you know, 6,000 words. So after we had the team go back to rewrite the scripts you know everything changed. The tone changed. The story changed. It became a really interesting story about why we do the things we do as human beings. Especially in the second series we had a lot more fun with it because we were allowed to be a lot more creative because we knew the medium. There wasn't this learning curve of trying to understand what video is like. Now knowing what video is like we were allowed to play with it. And so we started the conversation saying what is amazing about the brachial plexus? What is amazing about the pterigopolitide fossa? What is the hook? What is interesting? How can we best summarize this topic in a way that would be engaging? That would capture people's interest and imagination. So one of the areas we wanted to teach about is called the impertemporal fossa here in the head. And there's a number of nerves that go through there and a number of fibers and it's complicated. So as we were developing this I kept on asking the team what's cool about this region? Why do we care? And so I threw in I like that taste goes through there. And so then Wayne said well I think the most important thing about this region is the way the parasympathetic fibers go through there which will supply your salivary glands. And then I said well now we're salivating and we're tasting. What else are we doing? And so we came up with this idea that we should just Complex flavors blend it into something absolutely delicious. The nerves that cause salivation and that carry taste as well as sensation from your mouth. The project was fairly challenging to film and it's challenging to film because you only have so much time, you only have so much budget and that equals crew. That equals the amount of time you have of rental equipment, the amount of hours you have with people in reality, the amount of food you can buy. And so your sequences tend to be limited by what you can spend on those things. In science that's not usually as big of a problem if something takes longer you just start again, you pick another day but this was very much like this is all the time you have so you better get it. And like that was just a different kind of stress that I hadn't experienced before. Videos are very different than a lecture in that every single thing that happens during the video is premeditated. And the thing about filming such dead scientific material is you actually require teleprompters so that the performers can read what they have to say. They know it very well but it's very difficult to perform exact scientific jargon on the spot. You know if I were to choose my favorite sequence in the whole thing it would have to be the opening to brachial plexus. So there was a circular track around the violinist that encircled the violinist and the camera was on the track and the camera went around the violinist as she was playing and I had to walk in and keep walking around the track. Into this scene walks you know Wayne looking like a million bucks who then begins to teach. The way the video was captured, the lighting, the music, the choice of the music and everything is perfect. 100,000 views like that project has been seen so many times that's very gratifying. Both of us felt that we wanted to get material into the public domain. I think that UBC is one of the best universities in the world has a social responsibility to reach out. We can't stay on our ivory tower and just keep our knowledge and our expertise to ourselves. Something like this is really easy to share and I think we have to. Now when you go and Google neuroanatomy the first thing that comes up is our website. Well they say the proof is in the pudding, right? So you have to go and see have you had an impact and one of the ways that we measure impact is of course through the assessment and so we had had the assessment of the neuroanatomy labs over many years the neuroanatomy lab exam and we had statistics on how students perform in that lab and it's pretty much the same year after year there's no statistical difference. When we flipped the classroom we were able to shift the bell curve to the right which means that we were able to help the students who would perform more poorly and shift them into the better performing cohorts. That was for us the proof that we'd had a real impact on student learning. The exam didn't change but the student knowledge changed and they performed much better. We did take these resources for granted to really understand how much work went into making a quality product. We started writing I think a first script in May of this year and we finished shooting it was in October I think yeah and yeah I think the movie is going to be out in January but there's a lot more time you know left me need to kind of figure out how to put animations in so it's a lot of works. Start early create deadlines and then deadlines for your deadlines and deadlines for those deadlines and you have to be really really proactive because it's always harder than you think it's going to be. It's awesome to have this on my CV as far as like a teaching portfolio thing it's anybody can go and teach a class anybody can go cover a lecture or give a presentation I've been a part of creating digital media for a website that's being viewed over a hundred thousand times it's kind of nice.