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:
If you’re the owner of a website, you know the power of search engines. If your website shows up high in the results, it means more visitors to your website. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. But, there are tactics you can use that help your website look more attractive to the search engines. These tactics are called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Our new video provides a review of the basics of SEO. Watch it now.
This video, like most in our library, is available with voice-overs in 8 languages. The languages are:
•English
•French
•German
•Spanish
•Portuguese
•Dutch
•Italian
•Japanese
This video and our complete library is available via Common Craft membership. As a member, you can display high quality versions of the videos in person, embed them on websites or download the videos for offline or internal use. In fact, our members learn about new videos before we announce them to the public.
A while back we realized something interesting about Common Craft videos: they travel well. We can replace my voice with the voice of a Spanish or Japanese speaker and the videos work. This set us on a path to take over the world.
Let me explain.
Educators and trainers in over 40 countries have licensed our videos since 2007 and we receive email regularly asking to translate the videos for their non-English speaking audience. If we could give these good folks a dependable resource for educating in their native language, it would mean reaching a global audience.
So, we built the new Common Craft to be a global resource, with videos and whole pages in multiple languages. Here’s our approach:
Making Common Craft Videos Global
For a small company, this was a big and complex project. About 30 videos in our library could apply to a global audience and we identified eight languages that cover much of the e-commerce globe. The list below links to "home pages" for each language:
That’s 240 videos files and translated scripts. It’s 240 individual video pages on our website. In addition to the video files, we had professional translations created for titles, transcripts and descriptions on each video page as well. Here's the Japanese page for Social Media in Plain English:
But that’s not all. We needed to have a way to introduce these non-english speakers to our website and subscription service, so we created translated home pages, which are abbreviated versions of the information on our home page, along with a list of videos in that language. We even had our "Common Craft Way" video translated.
Is It Working?
Based on the first 30 days that the new Common Craft was up, yes. People in 7 countries have become members.
This gives us confidence that we could be onto something. According to this chart of Internet languages, we’ve accounted for about 50% of the world’s languages. This also offers English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and multinational corporations who have a global workforce multiple language options.
Now our goal is to be discovered. If you’re interested in using Common Craft videos or helping us gain visibility in other countries, let us know or become a member.
You may have seen these little codes around. They're in newspapers, on storefronts and products. They're called Quick Response (QR) Codes and they're meant to used with your smartphone. They could be a very big deal in the future. This video is one of our most requested titles and explains how QR codes make the real world clickable.
This video, like most in our library, is available with voice-overs in 8 languages. The languages are:
English
French
German
Spanish
Portuguese
Dutch
Italian
Japanese
This video and our complete library is available via Common Craft membership. As a member, you can display the high quality versions of the videos in person, embed them on websites or download the videos for offline or internal use.
In fact, our members learn about new videos before we announce them to the public. Common Craft member Lee Kolbert was the first to use this video in a blog post and break the news.
A while back we realized something interesting about Common Craft videos: they travel well. We can replace my voice with the voice of a Spanish or Japanese speaker and the videos work. This set us on a path to take over the world.
