Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.
Instructor: Nathan Hernandez
Thought I'd do audio this time to see if my hosting was different. I apologize for the tangent about lignin in the middle :)
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
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NATHAN HERNANDEZ: All right, day 4. Today, I'm doing an audio recording to see what's the difference when I'm talking versus in my video. So moving on-- day 4, story boarding. First off, I apologize to you guys I seemed a bit out of it during class. When I made my last reflection, I said I was going to go to bed. And then some things happened that caused me to have a bit of a thing to deal with that I couldn't go to bed until I got to a point where I would have been sleeping through class if I had tried to sleep, because I don't like getting up.
Anyway, day 4. Story boarding was really interesting. It's really made me think about how I'm going to present my material, not just in making sure the content is interesting, but how to keep everything visually engaging, because I can't really just sit and talk and word vomit all the facts. And I knew this. But I hadn't really thought about how are you going to go about this.
So it's kind of difficult because I still don't have my script. I'm working on that. And I have not very much at the moment-- just a lot of fragments. And I'm going to try to piece together. But I also had a bit of an aha moment this morning. It mainly gave me some ideas on what I can do for my story moving forward. Particularly, what I guess I'll just say is one, I've been looking at decomposition in just the context of food in the fridge.
But I think one question I get asked that could be the title of the video even is how's your fridge like a forest floor? Because the cool thing with decomposition is that there is basically nothing on Earth that eats lignin. Lignin is the other main polysaccharide or sugar-like carbohydrate thing that makes up wood. It's cellulose in a matrix of lignin. And people think it's cellulose, but not think it's lignin.
Termites eat it. And then protists in their stomach digest it. And then there is fungi and bacteria that can digest lignin. And that's a really cool thing that decomposers do that the world really actually needs, because if you imagine-- and this is the second idea for a video that would really be turning everything on is imagining a world without decomposition and what that would be like. That could be another thing. Both ideas that I think would make great videos. And it would be I think a good place to go with where I am, because right now, I'm just going through an explanation video of decomposition.
And, yeah, those are the two aha. What would life without decomposition be? Or talking about how your fridge is like a forest floor. And you could even say like your stomach and how the word decomposition-- but I probably won't do the stomach. Aha moment, storyboarding, I think I've come up-- at least for the part I did storyboard is actually a pretty good way to present the material. So I'm excited for that.
And yeah, I really, really liked the presentation by Planet Nutshell. I thought they did a great job. And they're super helpful and getting me to understand what the process is. Yeah, wow! Makes me appreciate also in the end, it was about a month working on that animation. So I think that animation is far beyond what I would expect myself to produce. But given I have less than a month-- less than professional skills. I feel a little less pressure, at least if I want to animate something or add these things, then that I'm not going to have to do some great production out of it. See you.