Blog Posts About: media creation

The First Readable Videos: Covid Safety in 2020

This post is an issue of the Common Craft Newsletter. Subscribe here.

Like everyone else in 2020, we were hunkered down and trying to understand how to live and work in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. We wanted to put our creative skills to work and started to develop a new method for creating animated videos.

At the time, there wasn't a lot of clarity about what to do to stay safe, but three ideas stood out:

  • Why Masks Matter
  • Why Social Distancing Matters
  • What is Contact Tracing?

We decided to explain these ideas in the form of Readable Videos. This way, we could produce them quickly and make them easy to consume in any context. We offered the videos and other materials as free downloads.

Looking back, the videos worked for many and I'm proud of them. Since then, I've learned more about how to make Readable Videos even more polished and professional.

​Why Masks Matter

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Why Social Distancing Matters​

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​What is Contact Tracing?​

One More Thing... Animated GIFs

One of the beautiful things about Readable Videos is that they are small in terms of file size. This makes them easy to share and easy to convert into an animated GIFs that plays anywhere you can upload an image. The gif below is under 0.5mbs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Readable videos are easy to create and require only free or built-in tools.  Learn more about Readable Videos.

Explainer Academy - Our Next Big Thing

This is your invitation to join us on a new adventure.

Every day, smart, well-meaning people write emails, have conversations or create documents that only make sense to one person: themselves. This lack of clarity causes frustration and wastes time. 

We can do better. 

That's why we're building the Explainer Academy. 

The Explainer Academy will provide self-paced, online courses that will:

  1. Teach you how to repackage your ideas into explanations that are irresistibly clear and easy to understand for your audience and situation.
  2. Show you exactly how to turn your explanations into animated videos, presentations, screencasts and more.

We’re working on the courses now and sharing our ideas and progress with an email newsletter. 

Or perhaps you can help us share the word?  Click the Tweet button to review before posting:

Interesting... @commoncraft is developing an Explainer Academy. I know people who need it.  http://explaineracademy.com

You can also follow the Explainer Academy here: