For your team assignment you will collaborate with a group of 3-5 students from your lab to propose, plan, research, and produce a 15-25 minute "Kurzgesagt" (in-a-nutshell) style video that presents a current computer science related topic along with its social impact.
Your video may focus on a topic (e.g., "Algorithmic bias") or on answering a specific question (e.g., How does facial recognition work?). Either way, you should start by explaining the topic in layperson's terms before discussing its broader impact and implications. You will assume a non-technical audience.
Here are places you can check out videos in the spirit of what you'll be producing:
At the end of the semester each team will submit a link to their final video. Before then, however, to help keep teams on track and allow us to vet and guide progress, there will be intermediate submissions. All deliverables are described below:
In week 4 lab, each team will work on a short, written "pitch", which in a few sentences describes their chosen topic or question and what facet(s) the video will focus on (if it is a particularly broad topic/question).
The submission is due before week 5 lab. We will get back to each team with either suggestions for changes or approval to move forward. The sooner you get approval, the sooner you can start working on the next deliverable. By the end of week 5 each team should have an approved topic/question.
In week 5 lecture, each team will work on a 1-2 page document that further fleshes out their topic or question. The executive summary should clearly state your topic/question again, and answer the following questions:
why is your topic/question interesting/important?
what social issues do you expect your topic/question to touch on?
who would benefit from watching your video?
what aspects of the topic/question do you need to do research on before you can start writing a script for the video?
how do you plan on researching your topic/question and its effects?
After submitting the executive summary before week 7 lab, we may provide further feedback or guidance on how to go about researching your topic, and what to focus on or think about. At this point each team should start doing research and putting together the next deliverable.
In week 8 lab, each team will work on a completed storyboard and draft script. The storyboard visually documents key frames from each scene of your planned video (with textual captions that briefly describe the scenes). (See the Wikipedia article on storyboards for some examples.) Your storyboard should contain at least 15 frames (1 or more per minute of screen time). Feel free to hand-draw these - tidily!
The script is essentially a screenplay for your video, with narration/dialogue written out, along with a description of on-screen action. While a typical rule of thumb for screenplays is that one page equals a minute of screen time, we do not expect a corresponding 15-25 page draft script for your video; some narration/dialogue can be improvised or left to the recording phase. That said, we do expect to see a clear framework for all content in the video.
Here's a crash course on how to format a screenplay - the formatting is not important to us, but it might give you some ideas on how to structure your script.
Submission is due before week 9 lab.
In week 10 lab, your team can start work on the video.
No submission necessary, just show your TA that you have chosen technology for video creation and that you have started video creation.
In week 11 and 15 lectures, your team can complete work on the video.
This is it! A link to the full video is due by midnight, December 3, just in time for us to post it for your peers to watch and review.