The one where four librarians become superstars

Well, maybe not super stars… but three of my colleagues (Robert Farrell, Stefanie Havelka, Jennifer King) and I headed over to the campus Multimedia Center last week to make use of their fancy film studio equipment and talented staff to shoot our brief instructional videos. These videos will be presented similarly to Google’s Teach Parents Tech videos: short & sweet (≤1min), easygoing narrative, screencasts where appropriate… So to emulate the great minds at Google, I isolated 16 areas/topics that needed videos, wrote the scripts, found actors, shot practice videos, tweaked the scripts, shot more practice videos, and, finally, booked the Center’s studio.

And then this happened!

We had a teleprompter and everything! It was quite exciting. Unexpectedly, a photographer from the Media Relations office came by and took photos of the studio (with us in it!) and control room for the college. So these photos may appear somewhere on the college website or in print, too! (They’ll be similar to these photos — taken graciously by Stefanie Havelka — but not as blurry or blown out. Sorry, Stef!)

So next on the agenda is choosing the best takes, making minor edits, chromakeying the green background out of the videos (and replacing it with … something — TBD!), adding text, creating the screencasts, inserting the screencasts, revamping the website that displays these videos, uploading these videos somewhere (most likely Vimeo), and launching!

…That’s actually a lot more than I thought I had left to do. Time to get back to work!