If you haven’t encountered the series of animated video lectures known as RSA Animate, you’d be forgiven for questioning the combination of cartoons and intellectual discourse in online video. By bringing these improbable elements together, however, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has hit upon an irresistible formula for modern infotainment.
The RSA, which hosts public lectures by eminent thinkers as part of its broader mission to “develop and promote new ways of thinking about human fulfillment and social progress”, has been sharing these talks as podcasts and videos for some time. In late 2009, a collaboration with artist Andrew Park led to the first illustrated version of the lectures being produced as a video. The RSA Animate series, which was born from that first video, has gone on to attract millions of views on YouTube and generated considerable discussion in the short time since.
Abi Stephenson, Events Development Officer for the RSA, produces the series and agreed to speak to Explainer.Net about what she’s learned from the project.
How did RSA Animate come about?
We were looking for a fresh, innovative way to disseminate some of the amazing content from our events programme. As you can imagine, with 150 events each year, we have some of the world’s most pre-eminent thinkers through our doors, and we really wanted to make sure their ideas could spread as far as possible (apart from the reach we already have – we have all of our podcasts online on iTunes, and have a huge following around the world).
We have an international fellowship of 27,500 people in all sorts of different disciplines. One of those fellows was an animator who had come do some ‘scribing’ at one of our events – he essentially made visual notes of what had happened in the lecture. We then featured it in a double page spread in our journal.
People responded to this in such a positive way, that one of my colleagues suddenly had the bright idea to somehow ‘bring it to life’. She downloaded some free audio software from the internet, edited one of our lectures down to around ten minutes, and sent it on to this fellow to see what (if anything) he could do with it to make it a live animation.
Well, it’s turned out to be quite a hit. Why do you think the series is so popular?
It’s always so tricky to say why one innovation just hits the right note, or really captures that ‘zeitgeisty’ moment, but I think in this case what really struck a chord was the absolutely ingenious and creative way the illustrator animated quite complex concepts.
There’s humor in there too, which doesn’t detract from, but actually helps get the often quite serious content across. Not only does it help those who are primarily visual learners (and we’ve had so much feedback to say that it does), it’s an attention-grabbing and arresting way of getting world-changing ideas across.
We’ve had 14 year olds emailing to say they’ve never sat through two minutes of anything on YouTube before, let alone ten. They somehow hold you and keep you in – and it’s so exciting to hear from young people saying they would love to learn like that all the time.
But it’s also in the ideas themselves. Each RSA Animate has a real thesis at its heart – often both inspiring and provocative, and they generate quite fierce discussion on the YouTube comments pages.
So, how do your speakers react to having their arguments condensed into such a short video?
Well, we were really very worried about that!
It obviously takes a lot of skill to strike the right balance – and you would think (and we certainly did) that the speakers would want to somehow write annotations and additions at the bottom of each video to explain themselves! But actually, every single person absolutely loved what had been done with their talks, and posted them on their own blogs. Dan Pink in particular has had a massive boost in his own followers following his RSA Animate video (Ed — see below).
The crucial thing is getting that thesis in a nutshell, though, and it can be quite tricky. It’s just a colleague and I sitting there, listening over and over to the hour long lecture and trying to condense it without being reductive or worse, actually obscuring the speaker’s meaning (which it is horribly easy to do when you’re chopping and rearranging). Neither of us had had any technical experience with audio editing, so we really were experimenting as we went along!
Sir Ken Robinson, as featured in an RSA Animate video
What is the most important decision you have to make, every time you produce a video?
That’s tricky. But I really think it is pinning the thesis down. Without that, there’s no RSA Animate – there’s nothing to debate, to discuss, to be inspired by.
We’re surrounded by so many brilliant ideas, it’s a real challenge trying to decipher one from another, and trying to select one that will really resonate internationally.
Is there a future for abstract ideas that can’t sell themselves quickly and digestibly?
Of course. I would never say that all ideas have to be brightly packaged and easily consumable – far from it. But within a sprawling lecture on society, say, there will always be one point that can be extracted and illustrated in a meaningful way.
And I guess in many ways the most important ideas are not the ones contained in the RSAnimates, but the discussions generated as a result of them. We want people to just get involved and engaged, and to really respond to the whole public realm of discussion and discourse – these might just be an appetizer before a massive feast!
What are the lessons you have learned by doing this series, particularly relating to explanation?
Gosh, loads of things. The power inherent in a good explanation, I guess!
I think we really underestimated the real force within an idea that is simply explained, and perfectly and creatively illustrated (in both senses of the word). That combination seems to be almost magic – each more than the sum of its parts. Once you realize the potential there, the whole exercise suddenly gains a real weight, so there is often that moment of hesitation and anticipation before we put each one out on the web to the awaiting hordes! Each time we think: “Did I get it right?”, “Have I made it work the way the last one worked?”, etc.
Is there anyone you’ve looked to for inspiration in the field of getting ideas across efficiently?
Well, funnily enough I was just re-watching some of Hans Rosling‘s talks today. He really shows the extreme example - how something as ‘unsexy’ and ‘dull’ as data or statistics could spring to life, simply by being rendered in a new and inventive way. And of course the whole point of the numbers and the data is suddenly, glaringly obvious!
There is some very good stuff happening in data visualization…
Has RSA Animate changed your organization’s strategy for reaching the next generation of thinkers in any way?
Yes. I think we’ve learned that long and involved is not the future, at least not online. People have a much higher tolerance for listening to an hour-long lecture when they’re in the room, but that tolerance is simply not there online — particularly for a new generation of thinkers who have so many claims on their attention.
But it doesn’t have to be a ten-second snippet or sound-bite either. I was smiling when I read a piece online the other day called ‘how to get your videos watched on YouTube’ or something, and it was saying never put anything longer than 3 minutes up, or noone will watch it! I really felt vindicated and smug then.
So, shorten things down, but don’t feel the pressure for them to be bite-sized. But the RSA does so many things, and the events programme (of which this is obviously a part) is only a piece of the bigger puzzle.
Interview by Niel Bekker
More about the RSA
The RSA was established in the peak of the enlightenment in 1754, and has been championing socially progressive values and action ever since. Through the work of its 27,000 strong fellowship and the multi-disciplinary research and projects undertaken at its HQ in London, it has sought to find ever new ways of thinking about human fulfilment, civic innovation, and social progress.
