This project required making a short, animated video of an informational topic. The inspirational concept for this project is my son's love of aviation. Learning about the engineering characterstics of airplanes and flight is important to him. Additionally, my core career field as an aviator in the Air Foroce provided me with a relevant topic to animate. Knowledge of aviation science and fundamentals is critical to understanding flight characterstics and doing my job effectively. Fortunately, my aviation career is provided a foundation through education and training to understand these concepts. Creating animations is helpful in teaching, even at the higher education level. Animations have the potential to break challenging concepts into entertaining and relatable visualizations. If done effectively, they reduce the cognitive overload of students, improve attention, and make concepts relatable. Animations provide an entertaining, informative, and process-oriented multimedia approach in education.
In reflection, this project was challenging to complete. The Adobe Animate program has functionalities that need clarification, making it difficult to interact with the software. There are sensitivities in crearing and interacting with the layers during the cronstruction of the animation. Overlaying the images or free-drawing is not intuitive. The functionality of Adobe Animate is unlike other media programs I have experience working with. Naturally, it will be easier with more tutorials and experience. Also, the 15-second duration of this project was challenging as well. Crafting an effective informational animation in a condensed time frame requires deliberate work. However, the free-flowing creativity and potential to create impactful educational animations are evident in the final products generated from class. Research by Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno addresses many components and methods for reducing cognitive overload, narration, and visual aspects of multimedia production.
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