 A few reasons. The first is actually, there's a story to do with my research assistant Chandra who actually showed me a music video done by a friend of hers. And it was actually a chalkboard animation. And the first thing that I thought of when I saw it was, that's exactly what I want to do. And the reasons were many. One is that the chalkboard is the obvious educational metaphor. The second is that I often labor in front of a chalkboard trying to explain things and it would be nice to actually be successful at that. And I thought that an animation would actually allow me to explain things a lot better than I could normally just my crew drawings in class or just with my verbal explanations. So, yeah, that's the reason for the chalkboard. And the reason for the stop motion animation in general has to do with, largely has to do with the zoom ability option. That is, with this type of stop motion animation, particularly chalkboard animation, I can create animations where I zoom in on things. And this is particularly important for what I'm teaching. I'm teaching about biological concepts that often occur, are dealing with concepts that exist at a molecular level. And many students get confused by this simply because it's completely decontextualized. Often the representations are very abstract, even visual representations are quite abstract. And I found that just simply contextualizing things by zooming in on the organism or the cell, even a single cell is sufficient to actually add an extra level of understanding. It's mostly topics that are conceptually difficult. They're the ones that I know from experience just dealing with questions around exam times that students are struggling with these particular topics. So my hope is that these sorts of videos will actually improve their understanding. I was expecting that first off the animations themselves, I'm striving to make them as memorable as possible. So they have some funny elements about them. They have some little quirks about them that make them stand out. Each one I hope to interject at least one of those little quirky type things. So for example, one of the videos we did has me pulling actually chalk lines out of the chalkboard itself in the form of some thread. And it's quite memorable if nothing else. And the reason I want to make it memorable of course is to make the actual concepts more memorable. And I'm hoping that by watching these videos students will actually be able to remember these concepts better and they'll actually perform better when faced with more difficult applications of those concepts. So these videos are conceptualized largely as pre-tasks. So students will basically be asked to view these videos on the course website or on YouTube. They'll actually be situated on both locations. And they'll have a number of questions that they have to answer related to the videos. So essentially preparing them for the tasks that will occur within the lecture, which will be more about doing applications or case studies of the various concepts that they learn from the videos. So the time that I would have otherwise spent struggling with verbal explanations and crude chalkboard drawings, I've now actually replaced with these chalkboard animations, leaving more time for application type learning in the classroom. So the first piece of advice is to choose your topic carefully. That is, this is a time consuming process and you need to be sure that the effort that you're going to put into it is actually going to pay off in some way. And I think I would also like to emphasize the fact that planning is critical to the process. So doing storyboards, doing scripts, doing all this stuff in preparation of the actual video takes will really save you time in the long run. It might feel like a lot of time up front but it will save you a lot of time in the long run. This method requires quite a bit of drawing. It's been very interesting for me. I do have a background in the art so I have a background in drawing and painting, static images. I've learned a lot actually doing animation just about how the visual system works in terms of learning how to represent motion, how you can do sorts of tricks and you pick this up quite fast. So I can actually at this point, now that I've done I think two or three long sets of sequences of images, I can, when I'm doing the drawings, already anticipate what the major issues will be in terms of perception of the motion. So it is involved. I would say that if you don't have some degree of confidence in your ability to draw even rough images, it might be particularly challenging. So the reason I do all my drawings ahead of time in that in part is because I'm a bit of a perfectionist. And what doing all those drawings ahead of time allows me to do is essentially use this projector and use in this template. So one thing that's very difficult on a format this large is to do drawings that are actually, that remain correct to your point of view. That is, it's very easy for me to draw a face on a piece of paper or on the computer. But when I try to draw that face in a large scale, it can become quite skewed. As I said, you could follow the method that I did and do all the drawings ahead of time. But if you were confident enough and not so concerned with sort of the aesthetics of it and more just concerned about getting it down, you could probably bypass that step safely, I think, if time is a concern. So this sort of work is somewhat technical. That is, it involves you. I think the most involved piece of it is actually learning the software that actually is used for creating the animations and also for doing post-production of the animations. But once you get over that relatively steep learning curve, it's something that can probably be moved increasingly to a one-man job. If you're doing chalkboard animations and you're actually in the frame as an actor in the frame, you definitely need two people involved. It's not something you could do on your own. You need a sounding board too for ideas, but both back and forth I think. I don't think I could have done it without you. Seriously.