Curriculum Video Content Production
Video helps lessons fit in with the busy schedules of students, employees, clients and more.
Bring Your Lessons to Life
From the classroom to the workplace, learning is a lifelong journey.
But in a world filled with millions and millions of curious minds, one thing in common is the power of video to make their lessons engaging and memorable. Most learners have a device, whether it’s their phones or a laptop or tablet offered by school or their school or workplace. Video is a perfect way to connect with them wherever they are—especially in an ever-distributed world.
We love working on educational videos. After all, we’re a team of curious creative thinkers too, always learning new styles or techniques to make our client work or personal projects even stronger. The idea of creating a video that not only informs but also entertains is what keeps us going.
As your video production partner, we also help occupy a sweet spot between your internal expertise and your external audience. We can help you break out of industry jargon, identify knowledge gaps in lessons and more. It’s a collaborative process that ultimately leads to curriculum content that is engaging to watch and easy to remember.
Content for the Classroom
When we think of learning, it’s easy to start in school. Although the lessons might change from grade to grade, video-based curriculum content is a perfect way to help support a teacher’s lessons. Video can bring to life a map, a diagram in a textbook, your times tables—with voiceover adding additional context to video as well. But video doesn’t just help support students, it supports teachers too. Teachers can learn lesson plans, best practices, teaching methods on-demand, in a way that helps fit their busy schedules.
Works for Your Workforce
Curriculum content is also perfect for an ever-distributed workforce. You may be adding remote workers who are a great talent and culture fit. However, they still need onboarding, training and upskill lessons and paying for in-person training is expensive and not feasible for all businesses. Producing curriculum content is a perfect way to make lessons accessible to wherever your workplace is located. Maybe you could even elevate and empower some of your staff to be featured within the videos!
Customers and Clients
As mentioned earlier, we’re all students in some way. Always curious to learn more about things we’re passionate about—or the tools we use everyday for fun or function. Curriculum-based learning content is the perfect way to get specific audiences up to speed in a way that helps with brand building too. Maybe it’s a chef showing the best way to use your kitchen appliances. Or a guitar shredder teaching how to get amazing sounds out of the effects pedals you manufacture. Step-by-step videos make for a helpful anytime watch…and are a little more fun than sorting through the owner’s manual.
How We Approach Curriculum Content
Getting Started
When we start a production for curriculum-based educational content, clients typically already have a specific idea about the information that the videos need to communicate. The conversation usually starts with learning more about the audience the videos are intended for. After our clients fill out a brief with some questions about the project, we have a kickoff call where we can learn more about the audience and their experience of watching the videos. Perhaps they are visual learners who appreciate diagrams or other graphics. Or maybe they’re super busy, and need short digestible videos. Understanding the audience and their learning style helps us then map a visual storytelling approach onto a pre-established lesson plan. And hey, if there isn’t a formal “lesson plan” either—that’s no problem. Within this beginning stage, our team can think of a way to organize information in a way that flows from video to video.
The Right Approach
After we’ve decided on our visual storytelling style, it’s time to get to work. For more open-ended explainer videos or advertisements, we often write scripts from scratch. But for curriculum content, our writing team usually will take existing lessons or information outlines and write them in a way that works best for video. This could mean making lines of information more conversational, dialogue that sets up transitions, or even a recap section at the end for knowledge retention.
Let’s talk a little bit about visual development too. Curriculum content comes in all types of production styles. Animation, live action—perhaps a mix of both. We make sure the visual and production approach works for both your brand and the information we want to communicate. A big key for the storyboarding and asset design for these types of projects is accuracy. Math lessons need to be formatted in the same way that students learn them. Diagrams of machines need to represent their actual functionality. With your help, we make sure that any visual aids are brought to life with this specificity along with a little design elevation that will make the video really sing.
Lights, Camera, Learning!
For live action curriculum content, oftentimes having a “host” actor or subject matter expert (maybe an employee) anchor the shoot is a good way to quickly and directly deliver information. For a shoot on set, we make sure that our clients are involved to ensure we’re hitting the information accuracy and general tone we’re looking for. This can be done through a remote video call set-up, or you can join us on set for a fun and interactive day.
Let’s talk about feedback too. As our team of editors gets to work, we’ll make sure your perspective is considered throughout the process. Sometimes a live action shoot provides us with even more great footage than we need (a good thing) so we’ll isolate our favorite takes for your approval. For animated content, we’ll provide you with drafts of the project in motion for your feedback—rolling your perspective into the finished product.
As mentioned earlier, oftentimes curriculum content uses a mix of live action and also illustrated visual aids. We keep production on these two aspects moving in a parallel path. We can lock in storyboards of the scenes we’d want to illustrate or animate, and work on those as we move towards a shoot date and cull through live action footage for our edit. This helps keep a project moving quickly, and also allows visibility into how both production styles are developing—allowing any tweaks to ensure that they are married seamlessly within the final video.
American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy
ASGCT is an organization dedicated to the advancement of genetic and cellular therapies through awareness and education on these treatments. We helped them break down these complex topics into over 30 easy-to-watch educational videos, along with crafting accompanying web copy and infographics.
SAI Global
Training around corporate workplace standards, practices, and processes is a requirement for a lot of organizations, and our long term partner SAI Global, hopes to make that a painless a process as possible for their clients.
For the last few years we've been lucky enough to complete several animations that were a part of their corporate training curriculum including that incapsulates a lot of topics including workplace safety, ethics, leadership, and many more.
Heggerty
The right video production partner can help you craft curriculum content at any scale. Take our partnership with Heggerty, for example. Over the past four years, we’ve produced over 120 videos for them—each featuring educators delivering direct-to-camera lessons while mixing in some helpful visual aids too. No matter if a lesson play is large or small, a video series can help ensure that you cover it all.
OER
Teachers teaching teachers. Try saying that three times fast! OER Project is a trusted partner for history curriculum development, and we helped them produce six videos that cover the need-to-know subject matter with a tone and approach designed to maximize comprehension and synthesis. A warm, charismatic host and some lively visual aids ensured that teachers could pass along the concepts to their students with ease.
SmarterBalanced
SmarterBalanced provides teachers with tools, strategies, and professional development resources to help them enhance their teaching and improve student learning. Over our seven video series, we utilized a flexible approach that allowed us to walk through the functionality of their platform while also speaking to holistic teaching principles.
Benchmark Education Company
Sometimes educational materials need a rebrand too. We worked with Benchmark to create a refreshed set of 90 phonemic articulation videos for classroom use for young students—45 in English, 45 in Spanish. On-camera talent was paired with bold, colorful graphics, ensuring our helpful visuals were easily legible.