CHAPTER 3

Creating Digital Media Fast and Affordably

In This Chapter

•  How can a consistent work flow speed up production and improve content quality?

•  What are the elements of a good digital work flow?

•  How can the rapid media technique work flow help you create fabulous digital learning content fast and affordably?

This book aims to help you make digital learning content that’s engaging, quick to produce, and affordable. Chapter 2 examined what makes engaging digital content by exploring how the brain works and considering universal principles of good content. Good digital content should captivate the learner, be understandable, and easy to remember. But we haven’t covered the fast or affordable aspects yet.

As a learning professional, your primary job is not making digital media content. It is helping people learn. Making digital learning content is just one of many methods you’ll use every week to develop people. It’s part of your professional toolkit along with skills such as coaching, leading classroom discussions, and facilitating learning activities. In the demands of today’s workplace, most will not have the luxury of approaching the business of making digital learning content the way an artist has when she leisurely wonders down to the seaside to paint a sunset.

Learning professionals spend many hours on the road, attend endless corporate meetings, and play tug-of-war with administrative duties like timesheets, assessments, and expense reports. This juggling act means that if they want to make digital learning content, they have to do it fast without compromising quality.

And while learning professionals must make it fast, they generally have to do it on a shoestring budget. They don’t work in Hollywood, where the budget for a single camera is in the tens of thousands of dollars (and up). Many shoot digital video on cameras from Amazon that cost less than $300 and, if they’re lucky, come with a free external microphone. Others produce podcasts using apps on their smartphones. And just as expensive cameras aren’t an option for learning departments, few have the budget for fancy editing programs or time to attend the training classes that will teach them to edit like a media professional. So they have to make content affordably, but without compromising the quality.

The way to achieve all this—make quality content fast and without breaking the bank—is to develop an effective work flow for the steps to get a task done and the consistent order you follow when doing so. Effective work flow is important for most tasks. For example, if you’re applying for a mortgage, the first step is to fill out some paperwork. Then a loan officer will conduct a credit check. If your credit score is sufficient, they will calculate your debt to income ratio to determine how much you can afford. Then they will require paperwork, such as your tax return or a pay stub to prove your income. Everything is done in an orderly and carefully managed way. If the loan officer gets sick or takes a promotion, a new loan officer can quickly jump in and take over the process because this explicit set of steps is followed by everyone handling mortgage applications.

When you get to more creative tasks like creating digital content, the steps may seem less clear, although you still follow a process. You start with a purpose for your message and consider how you will achieve that: Will it be by interviewing someone, researching some background material, or another approach? You break down your message into a series of chunks and put it into a sequence that will make sense to your learner. Then you record, shoot, draw, or write the content. After this, you review it, check its accuracy, and sign off on it.

After you follow a work flow a few times, it becomes a habit. The more you follow it, the more entrenched the steps become, and you will find it becomes automatic—just like making your morning coffee. When you stumble into the kitchen each morning, wondering why the alarm clock went off earlier than it should have, do you grind the coffee beans first or boil the water? Whatever your approach, you probably do it the same way every morning.

When it comes to a complex task like creating media content, following an inefficient work flow that has a poor sequence can add unnecessary time. When you’re making your morning coffee, it may be quicker to boil the water first before grinding the coffee beans because you can grind the beans while the water is heating up, saving you a few extra moments to read the newspaper or get dressed.

But sometimes it’s not always obvious which steps to do first to improve production time. For example, you’ll notice that when we discuss video work flow later in the book, drawing the storyboard comes before writing the script. While this seems counterintuitive, it actually shaves considerable time off the production process and helps ensure each shot flows from one to another without looking inconsistent. Getting the order right in a work flow can make a huge difference in terms of efficiency. If you’re busy designing classes, attending meetings, and all those other things that learning professionals juggle every week, wouldn’t it be nice to save three hours? An effective production work flow will help with that.

Some people don’t have a work flow at all because they produce podcasts or videos so rarely they just think it up as they go along. But this path to digital content is rife with stumbling blocks. They may grab their camera and head out to a shoot only to realize once they get there that the light is inadequate. So they either have to wait until the following day when there’s more natural light or head back to their office to grab a lighting kit. It’s a little like cooking—if you’re frying an egg, you get the spatula out before you crack the egg in the pan rather than hunting for it at the time it needs to be flipped, risking the yoke being overcooked.

In short, an effective work flow establishes the tasks you need to complete a project. It determines the best sequence in which to complete the project efficiently. It helps the work become a habit, thus freeing your mind to be creative. And it makes collaboration easier because all people on the team share the same expectations about when the task should be done, in which order, and to what standard.

The Rapid Media Technique

If over a few years you were to work for several different media companies, say in a series of TV newsrooms, you’d find that while each one has its own ways of doing things, most will largely follow a similar approach. The general steps will be the same across the board, but each newsroom will localize a work flow to suit that organization’s culture, its technical setup, and the personalities of its editors and on-air talent.

The work flow presented in this book is based on my experience helping both media and nonmedia practitioners and organizations in more than 25 countries around the world. It comes from observing what does and does not work and helping clients develop strategies that have led to significant improvements in production and content quality. This work flow does not seek to critique other work flows or comment on localized approaches; rather, it seeks to share one that has been successful in helping many other people and organizations, especially in the learning world.

This work flow is presented so you can adopt its general steps and adapt them your own organizational context. Its emphasis is on churning out lots of content and doing it consistently to a high standard. And it is designed to help you make that content faster without compromising quality. As you know, everyone wants everything faster today, and it’s no exception when business units come to the training department for support.

The rapid media technique follows three significant stages:

1.  plan

2.  create

3.  edit.

This work flow loosely parallels the traditional production method for film and broadcast of pre-production, production, and post-production, except it seeks to be more generalized to also include digital text and graphics. The techniques are adapted for use on affordable equipment, such as microphones or cameras you can buy on Amazon or at electronics stores. You needn’t spend your entire budget on this equipment. In fact, fancy equipment can get learning professionals new to the technology into trouble because it’s easy to be distracted by advanced functions that often aren’t necessary for their purposes. As we explore each modality, we will look at the process of making engaging content fast and affordably through these steps. Each step will in principle be similar but, by virtue of the differences of making digital text to making video, will have different steps specific to that modality. Let’s consider an overview of each stage first. We’ll go into specifics for each modality later in the book.

Step 1: Plan

Planning media content is the most important stage of production, yet it is probably the most overlooked. Regardless of whether you’re writing screen text or shooting video, the more time and energy you put into the planning, the better your product will be and the quicker it will be to produce. There’s not a specific rule that says how much time you should spend planning content, but it’s reasonable to suggest that of your overall production time, the percentage of time allocated to planning should be around 40 percent for screen text and video, 30 percent for audio, and 20 percent for graphics. The breakdown may vary depending on the topic, but if you’re not putting enough time aside for planning, your content will not be as focused and you will end up spending more time to produce it.

Why is planning so important? It enables you to focus on your message and learning objective, which then becomes a yardstick to measure every element of your content to ensure that it achieves your objective. It enables you to create a production schedule that is efficient and avoid problems that can set you back, such as being told by security you can’t film at a location you needed because you didn’t get permission. It also gives everyone on the team, from the person holding the microphone to the person drawing the graphics, a precise set of editorial and production expectations. The more you plan your content, the more you are free during the creation stage to be creative.

Each modality demands different approaches to planning. However, planning generally involves editorial tasks such as developing the learning objective, breaking content into digestible chunks, and creating narrative structures appropriate for your audience. You’ll complete logistics such as conducting research; booking interviews; getting permissions or clearing copyright for graphics, music, and artists; and drawing up shot plans.

Step 2: Create

Creating content is what most people traditionally associate with media production. It’s filming, recording audio, writing the blog post, and drawing the graphics. The focus for this stage of production is doing everything right and allowing your creativity to sweeten it. If you’re producing a podcast interview, you must record the audio clearly and at the right level with the microphone positioned correctly. If you’re taking a photo to drop into a presentation, you must ensure that your subject or object is well lit and clearly in focus. When shooting video, correct focus, lighting, and audio are crucial.

The reason it is important to do everything right during the create stage is because correcting mistakes when you move on to editing wastes time. In fact, if you’re really unlucky, you may have to go back and reshoot your pictures or rerecord your interview. Even correcting simple mistakes such as an underexposed shot wastes time in the edit stage that could be spent being creative. The best way to ensure that you create content right the first time is to plan your content and then minimize the times you have to improvise to capture the content.

Creating digital content requires skills too, which take time to learn. If you have planned everything well, your mind will be free to be creative. Instead of just reading your list of questions for a podcast interview, you’ll have the mental bandwidth to listen to patterns of answers and generate new lines of inquiry to draw out the talent. In addition to shooting what’s required on the storyboard, you’ll have the brain space to recognize other visual opportunities on location that you may not have been able to anticipate while planning, which might give the shot more pizzazz.

Ultimately, if you plan your content well and create it correctly, you set yourself up to save a lot of time in the edit stage.

Step 3: Edit

Editing digital content is the final stage of the rapid media technique. Similar to creating your content, the process for editing each modality is unique. Editing audio is about cutting out unnecessary words or phrases and adding music and sound effects where appropriate. Editing video is about positioning shots along a timeline, trimming them so they flow together, and adding things like music and effects. Editing graphics involves preparing the final image for inclusion in an article or video. And editing digital text involves looking at structure, accuracy, grammar, and spelling, as well as integrating other modalities into the narrative.

The key to good editing is being organized and disciplined. In fact, the better your administrative systems are and the more disciplined you are at sticking to them, the faster you will be able to edit. The vision of an uber-organized practitioner may clash with the romanticized notion of the creative editor who doesn’t wear socks and works late into the night. But talk to the best editors and you’ll find the reason they can be creative is because they have procedures for organizing digital assets, file name conventions to manage different versions of their product, and other systems that stop them from losing content, getting confused, or feeling bogged down. Their excellent organization frees their minds to let their talent shine.

Good editors are good with software. Understanding software like MS Word, Adobe Acrobat, Scrivener, and InDesign is important, as is using content and learning management systems. For audio producers, knowing file types and audio editing software is crucial. Video editors need to be skillful at video editing programs and advanced tools like After Effects, while graphic designers need to know their way around Photoshop.

Summary

Work flows can have their limitations, and it’s fair to acknowledge them. Often circumstances will change and you need to be flexible in your approach. For example, you may be called to create content with little notice or in response to a last-minute opportunity. This doesn’t allow you to do extensive planning, so you are required to improvise. You’re not going to turn down an opportunity simply because you didn’t get a chance to do a shot plan or set up a series of interview questions. At times, going with the flow is necessary. There’s an old saying, “Rules are for the blind obedience of fools and the guidance of the wise.” There’s a lot of truth in this—along with some danger. Be flexible but don’t allow this flexibility to be an excuse to avoid a work flow. Not following a work flow will inevitably require more correctional work at the end of the process.

Having discussed the dynamics of digital media, the way the brain deals with media content, and the work flow for making engaging content affordably, it’s time to get specific. The following chapters will explore each step of the rapid media work flow for each of the four modalities: audio, video, graphics, and screen text. We’ll explore how each modality works in a learning context, look at what to plan before you start creating, decide on what equipment you need for production, and walk through the practical steps of creating it and how to edit it.