The Value of Whiteboard AnimationNysmith School for the Gifted Case Study
In early 2018, Ken Nysmith, the principal of the renowned Nysmith School for the Gifted, had a problem. The Nysmith School, a private secondary school in northern Virginia, is known for attracting highly motivated and scholastically ambitious students. Nysmith students and their parents have high expectations for their academic experience. The Nysmith School boasts 100% college acceptance for its students, with many of them landing in ivy league universities.
Unfortunately, the self-imposed rigor led many of the students to neglect the social and community aspects of the school. For Ken, who represents the second generation of his family leading the school, the sense of community was just as important as the strong academic standards. Ken wanted to maintain the expectation of high academic standards, but he was also concerned about stress and burnout. He wanted to instill a love of learning in the students, so that they would love coming to school every day.
In listening to parents and students, Ken found that the majority equated advanced academics with rote memorization and repetition. He wanted to change that perception. He wanted students to both challenge themselves academically and to discover an intrinsic thirst for knowledge and discovery within themselves. And he especially wanted parents and students to understand that repetition and memorization doesn’t equate to academic achievement. Ken had attempted to communicate with the parents and students using the traditional tools available to him: speaking at back to school night, sending newsletters, and posting information on the school website, but he felt the message wasn’t reaching his audience.
In April of 2018, he reached out to Lizard Brain. In exploring the challenge and speaking to the school’s leadership, we decided that the best way to communicate the message was through the novel approach of a whiteboard animation.
A whiteboard animation (or “action sketch”) is high-speed, time-lapsed illustration captured on video including voiced explanations. Typically two minutes long or less, whiteboard animations can communicate complex messages quickly and effectively.
At Lizard Brain, we began our work with the Nysmith School by outlining the key messages that they wanted to communicate. At this stage, we like to use a mindmap, a radial network diagram, to facilitate a meeting with key leadership, mapping out and organizing the key threads of the message. When outlining key messages, more content is better! We draw out as much of the context, challenge, solution, and benefits of the messaging as possible.
Our next step is to draft a script.
A compelling whiteboard animation begins with a solid script, written for the spoken word. We prefer to use Google Docs for the script writing process so that the writing process is more collaborative with our clients. The draft script includes three elements:
A description of the image
The spoken word narration
Edits, where we clarify and explore alternatives
Once the first draft is approved, we draw rough pencil sketches for each scene, turning the script into a storyboard of images and narration.
We go through reviews and iterations to finalize the storyboard. Then, we finalize the illustrations in detail.
Then, we begin the work of digitally animating each illustration.
Sometimes, our clients might prefer a more organic style, in which case we use video to film the drawing process by hand.
Once the animation or filming is completed, each animation is edited together and matched to the recorded voiceover. Intros, outros, and a musical soundtrack complete the final video.
The Nysmith School featured the whiteboard animation Lizard Brain produced on its homepage, and showed it at key events and through its social media. Months after our work with the Nysmith School was completed, we heard from Ken that he was very happy with the impact the video had made on the school community.
You can watch the final Nysmith video here.