Whether you’re an illustrator, video editor or motion designer, it’s important to keep your files organized. Especially with video editing, it’s easy for your projects to quickly spin out of control. You often have video footage, audio, still images, graphics and animation files that you need to keep track of.
As both a video editor and animator, I’ve tried various schemes to keep my files organized. For many years, I used the following (or something close to it):
This is obviously better than files scattered across your desktop, but it’s a very flat file structure and specific to the type of videos that I create. What happens when you’ve designed something in Adobe Illustrator that is referenced in your motion graphics project? How do you keep those files organized in this scheme? Or what if you are just doing a simple design project? Is there a way to keep those files organized that would be immediately obvious to anyone who picks up the project?
The answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is, yes! Recently, I had an file organization epiphany (oft had in the shower) that makes organizing a whole lot simpler and consistent across projects. It’s applicable to any kind of project where the finished product is rendered out. For example, a video, animation, photo or illustration.
In a nutshell, the structure looks like this:
If you are doing a simple design project in Adobe Illustrator, your files and folders might look like this:
If you’re doing something more complex, you can repeat this structure all the way down through you entire project. This way everything stays organized from top to bottom.
Here’s what a more complicated animated video might look like:
The important thing here is that this way of organizing files is SCALABLE. It can be used on any project, from small to large, keeping your files grouped logically, readily accessible and easy to find.
In a future installment, I’ll take a look at the the bigger picture of how I set up my drives to store these files and folders, and back them up incrementally so that important work is not lost.
I hope you found this useful. If you do something different and you think it’s better than my system I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Here is a fun and informative video by scientist-filmmakers Neil Losin and Dan Nappen on the bite of the crested anole–a lizard native to Puerto Rico which has invaded South Florida. Neil is researching how the transplanted anole has adapted to its new environment by measuring its bite force, an indicator of food preference and level of competition with other lizards. The video has a great sound track and engages us with simple motion graphics that help elucidate where the research is taking place and how the Florida anole compares to its island-inhabiting progenitors. You can watch more of Neil and Dan’s videos on the website of their production company Day’s Edge Productions.
Ever wondered what makes a video go viral? As an online science video producer I’m constantly mulling over this question, trying to figure out the right formula of content and style to create a popular video.
And additionally, viral videos have these qualities:
Short
Original
Unusual
Unexpected
Funny, mysterious or sexy
To see if Nalty’s observations apply to science videos, I checked them against the all-time top-viewed videos in the “Science and Technology” category on YouTube. Here they are in descending order:
Pregnant Robot Trains Students(4:02) 35,448,518 views A news video from DiscoveryNews.com that shows medical students learning to deliver babies from a robot that looks like a pregnant woman.
REAL ghost girl caught on video(2:59) 27,592,319 views A brainless Ghost Hunters/Paranormal Activity-style video with the cameraman freaking out because he believes he saw an apparition.
Sonic Boom (2:30) 19,600,176 views A simple narrated video that explains how a sonic boom is created. Includes some amazing photos of fighter jets amidst a pressure wave.
Piano stairs (1:28) 14,132,358 views Brilliant video showing that if you make stairs into an electric piano people will favor them over an escalator.
ISLAM ,MAHDI,DAJJAL(ANTICHRIST) ,JESUS CHRIST,UFOS,NASA (5:22) 13,721,915 views Basically, this is an old Turkish guy video blogging but I don’t speak Turkish so I have no idea what he’s saying. Based on the title I’m guessing it’s some nutty shit–which may explain the appeal.
Did You Know? (4:56) 12,910,395 views Infographic video on the progression of information technology.
R.M.S Titanic (4:31) 11,961,549 views Audio slide show of old Titanic pictures and some more recent video of its rediscovery.
So how do these videos stack up to Nalty’s observations?
A majority of them fail in terms of content. The overriding element that remains is music. Seven out of ten videos contain a compelling soundtrack. The other two elements that survive are pranks (“Piano on the stairs”) and video blogs (“ISLAM ,MAHDI,DAJJAL(ANTICHRIST) ,JESUS CHRIST,UFOS,NASA”).
As far as Nalty’s qualities, I’d say most of them hold true. All the videos were relatively short; the longest at just over five minutes. All are originals, not remixes of other videos. Many are unusual or unexpected: a live streaming surgery, a robotic birth, little known facts about the growth of information technology and stairs turned into a piano. As for “funny, mysterious or sexy”, those are so subjective that I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
Here are some other observations:
YouTube could really use some modest curation of its content. The “REAL Ghost girl” video has about as much to do with science and technology as Politico.com has to do with restaurant reviews. The other offender here is the “R.M.S. Titanic” video which, by some impressive stretch of the imagination, could fit under the umbrella of technology, but plays more like an homage to James Cameron and Celine Dion. I’d also like to see YouTube split its science and technology category into “science” and “technology” to give science videos a fighting chance (see below).
Only one of these videos (“Sonic Boom”) actually contains any science content. The two most viral topics seem to be technology and medicine, which are applications of scientific knowledge. In fact, two of the four most popular videos are an intersection of medicine and technology.
The more visceral or unusual your thumbnail image is, the more views you’ll get. Who can resist clicking on the E.T.-like thumbnail of the Turkish video blogger? Who knows, maybe he’s got the inside scoop on an alien landing?
Speaking of old Turkish bloggers–if you are a crazy nutter, you will get views.
So what would the ultimate viral YouTube “science” video look like then? I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking the description would read something like this:
Alien Birth Pranksters fool onlookers at the mall into believing they are watching an alien birth using futuristic medical devices. Soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers.
David Attenborough in “The Life of Mammals” Image: BBC Worldwide
Here’s a list of science and nature documentaries that have made an impression on me over the years and continue to be a source of inspiration as I create my own body of work. If you think I’ve missed an awesome movie or three let me know in the comments.
This is a documentary about apoptosis–a.k.a. programmed cell death; a topic most documentary producers wouldn’t touch with a very long stick. But it’s artfully pulled off by Jean-Francois Brunet and Peter Friedman (a microbiologist and film director, respectively) by blending archival footage of Hollywood musicals with microcinematography of cells committing suicide.
The best series on ocean life ever; both for it’s broad scope and magnificent cinematography. If you get the series on DVD be sure to check out the supplemental disc “Deep Trouble” that highlights environmental threats to our oceans.
An expansive series on mammals great and small narrated by the illustrious Sir David Attenborough. Aside from the ace cinematography what amazes me about this series is how they stitched the whole thing together. One minute Sir David is in New Zealand telling us about the duckbill platypus; the next he’s standing on the African savanna explaining the feeding behavior of a bush baby. It takes great ingenuity and planning to create a seamless narrative like that; filming on different days, with different crews and across different continents.
Aside from its sweeping vistas of our planet and never-before-scene shots of animals in nature, the stand out thing about this series is the jaw-dropping stop-motion footage of plants. The flora that covers our planet rarely serves as anything other than a backdrop for the charismatic megafauna that populate most nature docs. But in this series the secret world of plants is brought to the fore. Also of note: the scene of a parasitic fungus bursting through the head of an ant (also caught with stop motion).
I was a huge fan of the “walking with” series when it first came out but the whole dinosaur theme got a bit played out. Then along came the prehistoric beasts chapter which explores the bizarre mammals, birds and other creatures that lived between the end of the dinosaurs and the dawn of humanity. Many of these creatures seem familiar, because they are ancestors of species that survive to this day. But it’s as if modern animals were re-imagined into horrific beasts from a cruel bizarro-world parallel to our own; see the andrewsarchus and entelodont featured in this doc.
A video recreation of Michael Pollan’s book Botany of Desire. In general, a solid film, but I would recommend you skim the section about tulips unless you are really, really into flowers.
Basically a video version of the first half of Michael Pollan’s second book, the Omnivore’s Dilemna. In Pollan’s book, he buys a steer and takes it all the way from field to slaughter house. In this movie the filmmakers use a similar plot device buying a plot of land to grow their own corn. Also of note: stop motion fun with Playmobil figurines that help illustrate more abstract concepts.
Documentary storytellers often talk about the “train” of their film. It’s the narrative line of the movie that pulls all the other parts along. In this case, the producers built the story around the DARPA Challenge, a car race sponsored by the research branch of the U.S. military. The twist is that these cars autonomously navigate the race course; a treacherous 130-mile trek through the Nevada desert. First car to the finish line nets two million dollars for the team that built it . That’s one helluva train!
This 2009 Oscar-winner, in Mission Impossible style, follows environmental activists as they try to film the secret slaughter of dolphins along the East Coast of Japan. This movie appealed to me as an environmentalist, animal-lover and spy gadget geek.
A profile of activist Timothy Treadwell who anthropomorphized grizzly bears and was eventually killed and eaten by one. This is less a nature documentary than an essay on the perils of believing that nature has our best interests at heart. Treadwell was a skilled filmmaker in his own right and his beautifully-austere footage of the Alaskan wilderness complements Herzog’s storytelling.
This nature doc grossed over $127 million worldwide, so I’m guessing most people reading this have seen it. So all I’ll say is this is a great film and one worth watching again…especially on a hot New York summer day when you want to fool your brain into thinking it’s cold out.
How they made this movie (included in the DVD extras) is as interesting as the film itself. One feature of bird behavior is that young chicks imprint on their mothers. That’s why you see a gaggle of baby geese waddling along behind their mother. The filmmakers exploited that behavior and tricked various species of migratory birds to imprint on human handlers. They put the handlers (and a camera) into an ultralight airplane and filmed the birds as they flew alongside their “mothers”. Wicked genius.
Personally, I find geology a bit dry, especially as the subject of a film, but this series works because it shows us how our planet was created.
Bonus:
I watched these a while back and have forgotten why I like them so much. But I gave them five stars in my Netflix queue so I’d recommend checking them out.
