Producing High-Quality Educational & Research Videos with Minimal Resources

Simple videos have been easy to create for some time, but high quality do-it-yourself educational materials is a more recent development. We’ve all watched enough unengaging videos, such as taken from a stationary camera in the back of a lecture hall, with a shadowy figure down in the front of the room, accompanied by painful audio and little sense of meaningful engagement. We can now do better; we can produce video ourselves with scholarly and educational value; and we can own the creation process so that the technology fades into the background while we work on content and style. I report on efforts toward do-it-yourself video production designed as optimally as I could find for our educational and research goals. My operating theory is to put in all the technical effort up front as startup costs, so that I can then focus on content.