Other Sorts of Films

Experiments

Genuine investigative experiments can make excellent filming subjects, but if you don’t know where your film is going it’s hard to tell a coherent story. Our advice is to stick with demonstrations for your first few films.

Career profiles

Know someone who’s doing an interesting job that’s somehow science-related? SciCast is teaming up with the incomparable Future Morph to build a library of films of people just like that. ‘Teaming up’ how? They’re sponsoring an Awards category.

Check back soon for more details.

Animation

Animated films can be time-consuming to make, but can also have tremendous impact. You have lots of control over exactly what happens, and it’s easy to re-record dialogue until you get it just right. We’ve quite a few animated films already on SciCast: see Mitosis and Grow Your Own Body Parts, for example, or Flu Animation for a hybrid of animated and live-action filming.

Stop-motion animation is most easily done with a camera linked to your computer, and a specific piece of software. We’re big fans of iStopMotion for Macs, and hear excellent things about Animaatiokone Studio Studio for Windows, too.

Time-lapse films are made by taking a picture every few minutes or hours, then gluing the results together. There are plenty of experiments that take hours or days to play out, and we’d love to see some examples of time lapse on SciCast. Stop-motion animation software tends to handle time lapse too, or most video editing software can glue together a bunch of pictures, if they’re numbered in sequence. Do some tests before you spend days on your film, though!

Powerpoint

The start of truly dreadful presentations is, all too often, Powerpoint. However, it can be used to produce rather neat animation sequences. Heartbeat is a rather charming example: very simple, but quite effective.