For the first half of the COVID pandemic in 2020, most graduate students at Duke were off campus and isolated from each other. This not only created well-being concerns, but also prevented the Duke Graduate School staff from regular contact with the students they support.
To help address both issues, we created a series of short videos called “Prescription for Persistence.” Each video offered a quick tip for navigating the ups and downs of graduate school.
I shot and edited the videos, including creating the animations in each. I also developed the plan for releasing the videos, rolling out one per week for 10 straight weeks during the fall 2020 semester. This provided us with a vehicle for regular outreach to students throughout the semester.
This was a case where I had a general idea of how I wanted the videos to look — a combination of talking-head shots plus some kind of animation — but didn’t know exactly what the specific sequences would look like until I sat down to edit the first video.
I had limited time as I was working on this project while juggling all the other duties of a one-person communications shop in the middle of a pandemic and a semester with many changes and uncertainties. So these videos had to be relatively easy to put together. Editing the talking-head shots was easy enough. The main challenge was creating the animations in an efficient way (especially when I’m not a motion graphic specialist).
I eventually decided on using a chalkboard background and making the graphics look like chalk drawings. For the graphics, most came from the stock vector art site Vecteezy to save time on art creation. The animation was done in Adobe Premiere using simple techniques like clip transitions and occasional keyframe animations. Once I got the routine down, each video ended up taking only 2-3 hours to create, with most of that time spent sourcing graphics for the animations.
The videos were well-received and gave us a recurring touchpoint with our students, as well as weekly content that could be repackaged for social media, newsletters, and other channels. It also offered a theme to build on, as we are already thinking about continuing the series in some way in the future. We are also considering taking the concept of the short video series and applying to other aspects of graduate school, such as application tips.