RSAnimate and MinutePhysics Videos

RSAnimate creates wonderful videos of lectures illustrated by animated drawings on a whiteboard. Here’s one of Daniel Pink’s excellent book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”:

RSA stands for “Royal Society for the encouragment of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce”. The animated drawings are very engaging and draw you into the lecture. Here are more of their animated lectures.

Inspired by these, others have started creating similar videos. You can hire “321 Fast Draw” to make this kind of video out of one of your presentations.

Henry Reich has done a whole series of “MinutePhysics” videos which explain an interesting physics concept in one minute. For example, here’s one about Schrodinger’s Cat:

The others are available here.

I really like this format! One minute is short enough that you can watch them on a whim, but long enough to say something interesting. It’s a different niche than the excellent but longer Khan Academy videos. It’d be interesting to explore what kinds of simple animation best convey concepts and create engaging videos. It’s easy to do sophisticated animations with tools like Adobe AfterEffects or Apple Motion.