Today I was reminded by Brain Pickings that it's Richard Feynman's birthday. He passed away in 1988, and would have been 94 today. I recently became fascinated with Feynman while doing research on the Art of Explanation book. Feynman was a brilliant and colorful American Phycisist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project and later won a Nobel Prize. He was known as "The Great Explainer" due to his ability to help people understand and more importantly, be inspired by science and the world around them.
From reading about Feynman, his ability as an explainer was based on a couple of big factors. First, he was very passionate about his work and his enthusiasm was infectious. He desperately wanted people to see the world in new ways. Second, he had the rare ability to empathize with his audience and be able to present ideas and complex problems from a perspective that made them simple and useful. He found new ways to approach problems that were original, unique and above all, effective. The Brain Pickings article provides this quote:
When Feynman faces a problem, he’s unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks… He was so unstuck — if something didn’t work, he’d look at it another way.” ~ Marvin Minsky, MIT
I enjoyed reading a book about his life called "No Ordinary Genius - The Illustrated Richard Feynman" by Christopher Sykes. This book has been adapted into a film that is now available on YouTube. I've embedded it below:
For over two years a company called Lilipip has been a member of our Explainer Network of video producers. Jen Zug and her team have run the show at Lilipip for while and now that Lilipip's owner has decided to pursue other things, the creative team decided to "keep the band together" and relaunch as a new company. Their new company is called What Now? Exactly! and starting today, it will replace Lilipip on the Explainer Network. We've always loved Lilipip's video explanations and expect more great things from the new company.
Here are a couple of videos that represent the first productions from What Now? Exactly!:
This is a guest post by friend of Common Craft, Darren Barefoot. He's a writer, marketer, Canadian and a big hockey fan.
During a hockey game in March, 2010, Boston Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara drove Montreal Canadians forward Max Pacioretty into the stanchion that separates the player's benches. Nearly a year later, it still looks like a brutal hit as Pacioretty 's head bounced off the corner of the boards. Chara received a five-minute penalty and ejected from the game. Pacioretty was sent to the hospital.
The next day, Mike Murphy, the NHL's vice-president of hockey operations released a statement about the incident. To the confusion of many fans, he chose not to further punish Chara for the hit. Murphy used a common generalization for the incident, explaining that it was "a hockey play". There was no further comment from league officials on the polarizing incident, but the sports media was host to an orgy of outrage and consternation.
The NHL's pronouncement from on-high was typical of how professional sports leagues addressed questions of the "supplementary discipline of players". They hold discplinary meetings in private, and emphasize expediancy over transparency. Traditionally, the less discussion there is of such incidents, the better.
Last summer, the NHL hired a new chief discplinarian, former player Brendan Shanahan. Fans knew Shanahan's predecessor as sometimes controversial and secretive, and so the new sherriff in town promised "a clean slate" and "fresh eyes".
The tale of the disciplinary tape
Among the changes that Shanahan has implemented, one stands out as a radical departure from the professional sports league status quo. Every time the NHL hands down a suspension--there have been 32 suspensions thus far--Shanahan records a short, explanatory video that the NHL shares with players, team staff and fans.
The videos are not only extraordinary for the way Shanahan openly discusses the NHL's rationale for a particular decision, but they're also terrific examples of coherent, precise explanation. Here's a recent example:
Shanahan introduces each video (he has some experience as a pitchman), and then offers a play-by-play of the infraction. He uses the typical tools of the sports broadcaster to break down an incident. He shows the play in slow-motion from a variety of angles, and highlights details of players involved.
Shanahan takes care to balance the hockey lingo with straightforward language. In the above video clip, he describes how:
Carcillo chips the puck behind Gilbert at the Edmonton blue line, creating a race toward the end boards. This is a 50-50 puck that either player can win, and in such cases a reasonable amount of physical contact is permissable as the players jostle for position.
The new or casual hockey fan may not know phrases like "chips the puck" or "50-50 puck", but the careful language makes it easy even for the non-fan to understand what happened. Shanahan is also careful to contextualize the incident, describing the game situation, previous antagonism between players, injuries sustained and other contributing factors.
Finally, he wraps up each three or four-minute video with a bullet point summary, as if he's just presented a set of PowerPoint slides on a new HR program at Dunder Mifflin.
The NHL has also begun to make more instructional videos public. Here's one called "Clean Hard Hits and Good Decision Plays" that aspires to show players and fans how to avoid appearing in the more punitive videos.
Heretics in the church of sport
If you're not somebody with a season tickets or a jersey section in your closet, these may simply seem like well-made if ordinary illustrative videos. They are that, but they're also a kind of heresy in professional sports. No other professional sports league has publicly produced videos like this to explain league rules and how they're broken. The NBA officials seem to be paying attention, though. They recently released a video rather defensively titled "Wade Winner Legal" to address criticisms that Dwayne Wade traveled on a game-winning shot.
They've proved to be an antidote to a lot of the plague of speculation and hyper-analysis that occurs in the sports media. Bruce Ciskie, writing for SB Nation, discusses the impact the 'Shanaban videos' (as they've come to be called) have had on fans and players:
I thought a two-game ban on Minnesota's Pierre-Marc Bouchard was patently ridiculou...But even in a situation where I disagreed with Shanahan, it's hard to say that his video didn't lay out a pretty strong case for the move he decided to make.
The videos are also working because the players are paying attention. I'll say it again. In a preseason that lasted less than two weeks, Shanahan's department was forced to do ten videos, nine of which involved decisions to suspend players for incidents.
In nearly two months of the regular season, the same group has issued eight suspensions.
In discussing why they introduced the videos, Shanahan cites the role of video in player instruction generally:
This generation of players, you can tell them a message, but what they really want to do is see it. This is how they’re coached. They get called in, and they don’t get a lecture, they get shown a video. It’s how they are trained and taught. It’s not enough for them to read a memo anymore.
Shanahan's comments apply to this generation of fans, as well, who are as literate with video as their parents were with words. The NHL videos are great examples of explanation in action. They combine the best of sports media with the best aspects of explanation--context, audience analysis, reptition and summation. They're great inspiration for today's communicators.
Today we’re announcing a new video: The Smart Grid - Explained by Common Craft. Watch it now.
This video is a bit of a departure for us, as it focuses on the electric grid that delivers electricity to homes and businesses in the US and is not about the Internet.
But the grid has a lot in common with the Web:
It’s absolutely essential to our modern work and home lives
It’s a network that works behind the scenes
It’s complex and not well understood by the public
Changes to it impact everyone
Indeed, we were drawn to this subject because the grid touches everyone in some way. And, right now, the grid is in transition and becoming smarter and more efficient. We learned a lot in making it and hope that it will help you enlighten others.
One of our most suggested titles, this video is aimed at educators who are on the front lines of helping students of all ages understand and avoid plagiarism.
In researching this video it became clear that there are two types of plagiarism - intentional and unintentional. While we cover intentional plagiarism, we also highlight the situation where a person has positive intentions, but lacks information about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it.
This video is currently available to Common Craft members with captions in English.
People often ask about the origins of what has become known as “Common Craft Style” and what inspired us to use paper cut-outs, hands and a whiteboard. The truth is, it was a solution to a problem.
I had been experimenting with drawing on a whiteboard in live action videos and found it frustrating. I felt like such a dork trying to draw and look at the camera at the same time. It felt forced. Sachi, always the problem solver and adult in the room, suggested our current format. She had seen me reach for paper and use drawings when trying to explain something and saw the format as a natural extension of that tendency.
Many years later, here we are. The original format of that first video, RSS in Plain English, is still very close to the videos we make today.
As it turns out, our videos use the same principles of some of the very first animations. They are live action recordings, with stop motion and other visual effects that create animations. I was amazed to see the video below, which was recorded in 1900, 111 years ago:
American animation owes its beginnings to J. Stuart Blackton, a British filmmaker who created the first animated film in America. Before creating cartoons, Blackton was a vaudeville performer known as "The Komikal Kartoonist." In his act, he drew "lightning sketches" or high-speed drawings. In 1895, he met Thomas Edison. Can you guess what this meeting with the famous inventor inspired him to do?
There is amazingly little difference between the animation above and what we do at Common Craft. It's a simple process of holding the camera still and changing what appears on a frame-by-frame basis.
For another example, consider Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python, which doesn't use video, but photos. He was the creator of the colorful animations that became one of the most memorable parts of the show. Here’s a video of him talking about his process in 1974 (via CartoonBrew).
Again, it’s very close to our process. It’s just stop-motion with cut-outs. Take a look at the example of his storyboards from the video above:
We start each project with “thumbnail storyboards” that look like this:
Here’s his lighting a set-up
And ours:
His hand moving the cut-outs...
And Ours...
So what we do has roots that go back to the very beginning. While these examples came to us recently and were not a part of our early process, I think it’s fascinating that the simple idea of live action animation has changed so little over the years.
To get a feel for our process, check out this time-lapse footage that shows the entire production of Twitter Search in Plain English:
This is a guest post by friend of Common Craft, Darren Barefoot. He's a 
