Turbo Visualator – making sense of nonsense

While going through my rss feed the other day, I found this interesting post from Duarte blog about avoiding use of confusing jargons in our presentations. It’s shows a video presentation which has long been used by to warn against the use of technobabble. Turbo Encabulator is a fictional machine whose alleged existence became an in-joke among engineers.

Durate has come up with a very interesting visual which helps bring clarity to information presented. I tried to go a step further to combine the video and the image. Here is the result.

What do you think? Which video is more effective? Which one will you remember more details about? The idea to create this video came from RSA’s Animate videos in which an illustrator draws images as a speaker presents a topic. These videos are created by Cognitive Media, an animation studio based in Folkestone, Kent in the UK.  My video is in no way a comparison to the very cool style of visual scribing used by Cognitive Media but still it can help a lot in helping catch attention of the audience.

Here is how I did this:

1. went to prezi.com and added a path to the visual. Prezi is a cloud-based freemium presentation software that provides a zoomable canvas which makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them.
2. next I ran the presentation in sync with the audio and screen recorded a video using CamStudio. CamStudio opensource screen recording software which is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
3. at last, I used Windows Movie Maker 2.6 to do a few edits using the original video, the screen recording and the stripped audio of the original video. Windows Movie Maker is a freeware from Microsoft which can quickly turn your photos and videos into polished movies. You can add special effects, transitions, sound, and captions to help tell your story. Windows Movie Maker 2.6 is listed for use in Vista operating system but It’s running fine on my Windows 7 system.

So, now you are ready to supercharge your video with the crudely conceived idea of a Turbo Visualator.