Through one of my clients – Fuentek – I get to work with NASA scientists and engineers. How cool is that!
I learn about technology they develop, then help them find licensing opportunities for the Intellectual Property. (If you want to learn more about Intellectual Property Management, visit the Fuentek blog; great articles.)
Here’s the idea: sometimes you need more than printed words to tell a convincing story. Consider adding pictures and audio. You can build a powerful multimedia learning tool – at a fraction of the time and cost you would need to create a video.
Electron Beam Free Form Fabrication (EBF3) is a technology that was jointly developed by NASA’s Langley Research Center and Johnson Space Center. Some day this manufacturing process will allow space travelers to make any new or replacement part on demand. You can read a good introductory article about it on the Fuentek blog.
To help potential licensees better understand the EBF3 story, I worked with the key scientist at NASA Langley to create a presentation. The technology is very complex but I think what we came up with explains it in a very simple way. With little effort I can now include a link to the EBF3 presentation (9.3 MB PDF).
That approach works OK but it has drawbacks. Since you store just a file on your website you’ll get very little benefit from Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A better option is to post the slides to a social media site … like Slideshare … and embed a slide player like this:
Cool huh? A slide deck can enhance your written copy by giving your reader some visual images to look at as they read. The great thing about using an embedded slide viewer instead of a hyperlink to a file is you keep your learner right there looking at the same page. Slideshare also does an awesome job of SEO and getting your slides ranked high in the search engines.
Pictures can only tell a part of the story. To really bring a story to life you need audio. Sound can give a story context, location, and even passion. So I decided to interview Karen Taminger, the research scientist at NASA Langley who I worked with on developing the presentation.
I used Skype and called Karen on her office telephone (using SkypeOut). She had a rough script I’d given her, we visited, and I just recorded her as she talked to each slide. Then I edited the recording, added an introduction, exit, some location sounds, a music loop in the background, and compressed it into a final audio file. Wow!
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Ok … now what if we put them together _and_ time the slides to change with the audio? That’s the best of both worlds. (You can even play the presentation in a high resolution, full screen mode if you click here and click the “Full” icon on lower right of the player .
Here are the same slides, but this time with a synched audio track. I uploaded the audio to Slideshare and used their really simple synching tool to create a Slidecast. A piece of cake! Now take a look and listen to this and see if it doesn’t tell a better story.
With video you can present 24-30 pictures every second. If you have a movie – say you wanted to show a product demonstration – video makes sense. Here’s an example of a very effective, but very brief video clip for NASA’s 3D hand-held laser scanner (click the video links at the top of the page).
You could use video to deliver your slide presentation, but I don’t recommend it. While you can do some neat slide transitions using video, it’s just not worth the time and effort. Let me show you.
I took the same slides, turned them in to a video, and posted it to YouTube. Oops, YouTube has a ten minute length limit. The EBF3 presentation runs 15:32 minutes, so I could only include the first ten minutes here:
and the last 5 minutes here:
Clumsy. And both videos take up 78.5 MB of disk space. Ouch.
Printed words tell a story; a picture is worth a thousand words; and visual audio can bring a story to life.
But personally, if you want to tell a short story on the web – and you don’t need a movie – and you want to do it professionally and affordably – I think it’s hard to beat a Slidecast.
. . . . .
So what about you, what do you think? Ever recorded an audio interview or produced a Slidecast? Have a different, favorite multimedia you think beats slidecasting?
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