I had never really thought about animation and impact until I met Jenny Fisher in the Birley atrium! Jenny showed me how she was using an animation app to support teaching and learning with her students. In my role as Senior Research Fellow, the dissemination and impact of research findings are, of course, really important. With the next REF already in mind, I immediately thought that using animation could be a good way of presenting research findings in a different way and of reaching different audiences.
In our research we’ve been using ‘impact summary cards’ to disseminate research findings and to try to encourage people to engage with our research outputs including journal articles, presentations and blogs. The cards are bullet pointed summaries of the outputs. You can see an example here: Card 3 . The impact summary cards worked as the basis of the animations and became the ‘story boards’ for the animation themselves. You can see an example here based on the summary card here: http://www.powtoon.com/show/cD6VeJyz38b/becoming-dishuman/
Because I already had the summary cards/story boards, I was able to make 14 animations in a day! (You can see that making them can be a little bit addictive, but making 14 in a day will cure you!).
So far, I’ve used the animations to support lectures, tweeted them and posted links to them from our project blogs.
I’m still learning to use animation and I know that the animations could be improved by slowing them down and adding a voice over and I will continue to develop them over time and, I hope, learn new skills, not least from Jenny and Hayley.
But I’d encourage anybody to have a go – #animateforimpact!
Animation, communication and social care 