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The Evolution of Money

I developed this explainer video project with a younger audience in mind. The purpose of the video was to give a brief explanation of how money came about and how it has evolved over time. 

Overview

This project was designed as part of my Master's Degree coursework at Bowling Green State University. The request was to teach the evolution of money to a 8 year old + audience. The content was to be engaging, informative, and a quick introduction to a complex topic. 

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To meet the goals of this project, I chose to go with an explainer video, under 5 minutes, and developed in Vyond. The characters and animation capabilities in Vyond allow for immediately engaging content, and the length of the video was meant to retain the attention spans of a younger audience. 

Process

For this project, there was no subject matter expert support. This resulted in my taking on the role of researcher in order to gather the appropriate information to be included in the content. When researching a project, I stick to only well vetted, preferably scholarly, sources for information as they tend to include better quality information. Once I had the information I needed to proceed, I organized the information into a visual storyboard  to more easily map out what I hoped to create in the end product.  Once the storyboard was in place, I wrote the script for the video. Having mapped out both the storyboard and the script ahead of development of the video, this saved me quite a bit of time when it came time to create the actual video. Once in Vyond, I was able to choose from the premade assets already included in the software to visually tell the story of the evolution of money. Once the images were in place, I recorded the voice over and mapped that to the visuals to render the final product video. 

Visual Mockups

Collage of screen shots from the video. They include our main narrator character, a woman at a grocery store. a person trying to buy shows, a hand holding dollar bills, a cow, a pair of pilgrims bartering for goods, a smart phone with the venmo logo on it, and a man working in an amazon warehouse and the cow from the previous slide is in the warehouse.

Results and Takeaways

I learned a lot during the development of this project. Aside from learning new information overall in order to compile the video, this projected offered an opportunity to utilize Vyond and to create content meant for a younger audience than I might usually be designing for. This video was well received by my peers and professors, and accomplished the goal set forth in the project parameters. 

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If I were to do this project again, I would include some interactivity or gamification in order to further engage the learner with the content. 

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