"Sarel's Choice" -- a hand drawn explainer video, helping you understand 'cost of opportunity'
Channel: Roy Blumenthal
Date: 2018-09-06

This is a three-minute explainer video I made for a group of Stellenbosch MBA students. They wrote the script. I drew everything, animated the work, and did a strong sound design to punch things up.

The concept their assignment asked them to explain was "opportunity cost".

Oh... You probably need an explanation about the 4th picture.

That's the economist, Milton Friedman. He's being misquoted, basically saying there's no such thing as a free lunch.

The thing he's holding is a South African meal, called a "bunny chow". A loaf of bread is cut in half, and the insides are removed, leaving just the bread crust as a shell. Then Durban curry is ladled into that.

Durban curry is the hottest curry known to humankind. It's hotter than Indian curry in India. Beware, if you're ever in Durban. You could make a tragic mistake and ask for a medium-hot curry. Unless you're used to it, you will experience internal injuries.

If you're interested in the production side of this vid, here are the details...

1. I read the script a dozen times, with highlighters in hand, isolating parts that needed speech bubbles, parts that needed scenarios to be drawn, characters to design, scenery. I also played the voiceover track, which the MBA team had recorded and sent to me. 

2. Working on my Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13, I opened Photoshop, and created an isometric grid, using a free action I found on the web. I drew several rough character designs, and worked out an easy way to colour everything fast. I figured using an isometric layout would solve the problem of making things in the distance smaller than things in the foreground. With an isometric layout, things don't change size. So that makes the animation much easier, especially using the low-tech method I chose.

3. I opened a SNAGIT screen-capture window, and worked out the maximum resolution I would be able to capture. This gave me the maximum resolution I could make the final video. (I wanted it to be at least 720p -- 1280 pixels by 720 pixels, which is what it ended up as.)

4. I then pressed record on Snagit, and drew the opening title. I saved that. Then I recorded myself drawing Sarel. Saved that. I decided that not EVERY drawn item had to be shown BEING drawn... I wanted the video to go smoothly, with viewers knowing that every element was drawn. So even though I recorded the making of EVERY drawing, many of them were intended only to be seen in their end state. This took two full days of work, both starting at around 7am and ending at around 11pm. 

5. The next phase, the easiest part by far, was me assembling the timeline in Premiere Pro. This had me throwing the voiceover track into Premiere, and editing out some of the repeats and mistakes, and changing the spacing between phrases to allow comic timing. I also realised that the voicing for the threatening thug didn't work. So...

6. I opened the free-and-open-source audio manipulation tool, Audacity, plugged in my EditorsKeys studio condensor microphone, and recorded a few takes of me doing the thug's voice.

7. Then I renamed each of the video files I captured in Snagit, allowing me to easily put them in the right order, and I dropped them into Premiere Pro. Then I started the painstaking job of speeding up each clip to match the timing of the voice. This is the 'meat' of editing... Making decisions about what supports the story, and what hurts it. This took about two hours. Maybe three. At this point, I exported the video, saved it to my Dropbox folder, and shared it with the client, noting that it was not complete, but could be regarded as a 'minimum viable product'. If a bus crashed into my studio and killed me, at least they would be able to submit the video, and get SOME marks. 

8. Now came my favourite part... Sound design. I happen to believe that audio is about 70% of the movie. I spent a lot of time on FreeMusicArchive.org, listening to tracks. The key things I listen for are: a) how the track starts, b) the instrumental bridge, c) how the track ends. These are usually the atmospheric 'usable' parts for a video. 

Sometimes, I'll only use three or four seconds from an entire track. It's absolutely essential at this point to know how the video will be used. This determines which Creative Commons license grants you the correct rights for distribution of the video. In this particular case, the video is NON-COMMERCIAL. It's a student assignment. It will not be sold. It will not be used to make money. So I was able to look for tracks with these two licenses: a) Attribution, Share-Alike, and b) Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike. 'Attribution' means that the originators of the track need to be named and attributed. 'Share-Alike' means that the work can be altered. I always open a Notepad file to cut and paste track info into, so that I can easily create a credits section later. 

9. I assembled the music tracks in the video. Then I added sound effects from FreeSound.org.

10. Added a credits roll. Done.