Hi, my name is Amir Jahanlou, and I am a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University.
My research is supervised by Dr. Parmit Chilana and aims to democratize access to
motion graphics video authoring. I recently worked on a system that enables amateurs to
create their first motion graphics video. In this presentation, I'll summarize the problem,
our design decisions, and some of the results from our observational study.
Motion graphics videos use a combination of sound, imagery,
and movement to convey messages. The advents of online publishing and digital camera have
made videography widely available to the masses. However, making an animated video
is still quite challenging, and a video of just one minute can take up to two days to create.
Despite the difficulty, there is a growing interest from populations, such as instructors,
journalists, or scientists who wish to use this medium to communicate their expertise.
Many of these individuals work in domains where videography is very difficult or perhaps even
impossible, making motion graphics an excellent candidate to share knowledge.
There are several specialized software for motion graphics that can create high-caliber videos.
Unfortunately though, these tools are often feature-rich complex applications that require
skills in graphics and animation. Most amateurs, of course, have no training in either of these.
As a workaround, users turn to slide creation tools to make videos. These applications,
however, have to be heavily repurposed to create a motion graphics video. Moreover,
because they are designed for a different goal,
they don't help the user understand the process of authoring an animated video.
So, given these difficulties, my research strives to empower amateur motion designers to create
their very first video. Many of these individuals -although experts in a different domain-
have no training in animation or design. Because of that, we wanted to provide them with a
solution that helps them understand the process while making a video. To that end, our design
considerations include various aspects, such as keeping the entire process in one single tool,
providing example content, or finding techniques to simplify animation.
In general, we wanted to provide a solution in the middle; not as demanding as specialized motion
design tools, yet capable of contextualizing the process and delivering high-quality videos.
Our efforts resulted in Katika. [Before I talk about our design,
I should mention that Katika is an old Sanskrit term that means the storyteller]
In any case, we designed Katika as an end-to-end system for authoring motion graphics videos.
It's designed upon the premise of simplifying the decision-making for its users. For instance,
we minimized the interface of Katika to three actionable views of scriptwriting, canvas, and
video editing. These three align perfectly with pre-production, production, and post-production.
Also, by keeping everything in one integrated software, we reduced the
cost of task-switching and the risk of users feeling lost between many different tools.
We also embedded multiple algorithmic and automated features in Katika. Among others, it
has a built-in algorithm to divide a long script into separate shots, an extensive repository
of highly editable artwork, and -similar to technologies such as Google Drive- it simplifies
collaboration by hosting everything on a cloud server. There are, of course, other features
built into Katika. In this video, however, I'll only focus on our animation technique.
Animation is perhaps the most challenging aspect of creating a motion graphics video.
The ability to integrate time and space and understand concepts of keyframing or
interpolation is only available to trained animators. Besides technical difficulties,
users also have a more prominent challenge: envisioning animation. For instance,
to animate this simple artwork, amateurs won't be able to anticipate an animation
while experienced motion designers immediately imagine many different directions. To solve this,
we turned to the practices of these professional motion designers. We learned that they continually
watch animations made by others in pursuit of broadening their horizon. Inspired by
this behavior, we designed a new paradigm of animation that we call "motion bundles."
In this technique, we bundle the animations of the different layers of an object and separate
it from its visual look. Such animation entities can then be applied to a different artwork.
A straightforward example would be taking the animation of a bouncing football and applying it
to a basketball. With such a technique, motion bundles can be shared, and in a library of
examples, users can try as many animations until they find the one that represents their concept.
There's so much more to be said about our design approaches that I can't
possibly cover in this video. For that, I'd invite you to read our paper. Here,
I want to turn into our observational study with 11 participants and introduce some of our results.
During the study, we asked participants to re-create a motion graphics video. To measure
their success, we assessed factors such as the use of artworks and motions, the number of the shots,
length of the video, collaboration success, and the time it took to finish the video.
I'm proud to say that all participants finished this in less than an hour,
and the average similarity score was 87%.
Beyond that, participants felt confident in their understanding of the process and expressed
their appreciation for the intuitiveness of the software or the value of exploration it offers.
They also asked if they could use this system for their actual projects,
such as P11, who said: I would use this to make presentations for my conference.
It's great to show visual stuff in presentations.
While many factors contribute to this enthusiasm,
the simplified experience of the software was quite empowering. P8, for instance, expressed:
The advantage of the motion bundle template is that they are just there and ready to use.
I could use the slider to extend the time to make them faster or slower. That really helps.
I invite you to explore a comprehensive account of our results in the paper. As I bring this
video to a close, I would like to offer a few directions for future research as well.
In the future, we hope to embed the process of conceptualizing a story
into our app and further the notion of end-to-end authoring. We also believe
that tools like Katika can help educate novices through strategies such as reverse-engineering.
Finally, similar to UI & UX, where new software applications empower prototyping, we hope
that video prototyping tools can help create quick and dirty videos, perhaps in realtime.
Our paper outlines the details of our attempt towards democratizing access to motion graphics
video authoring for individuals with no formal training. We contribute the design
of our end-to-end system, the novel approach of motion bundles, and the insights from our
observational study. I invite you to read our paper and thank you for watching this video.