Video Scribing puts the magic back into web videos
Video Scribing, or Whiteboard Animation is a new visual style for explainer videos and other video content. Video styles are like the fashion industry, and new trends are always emerging. For the last few years many explainer videos shared a common style – simple but quirky animated characters on a pastel-colored background of blues and greens.
Video Scribing takes most of the color out of the videos and replaces it with something almost magical – actually being able to watch the video being created before your eyes. For those of you not artistically inclined, there is a certain fascination with watching art being created (similar to struggling cooks watching a master on Iron Chef).
Does this fascination and attention on the creation help viewers focus on the message, or is it possible it’s actually distracting and the message is being missed?
David McCandless, a journalist and information designer from London gave a TED talk a couple years ago talking about ‘data visualization’. He mostly produces infographics and other images that visualize large amounts of data, but his explanation for why this is so necessary applies to videos as well.
In essence, he says, we are all so used to being overwhelmed by information that it’s all but impossible to process. But, he said, being exposed to so much media for so long had given him what he calls a “dormant design literacy