Captivate Course
Short Film Story Design
Introduction
As someone who is a lover of films and filmmaking, I challenged myself to build an introductory course on the fundamentals of story design, and its place within the medium of short filmmaking. The course was designed and built using Adobe Captivate, featuring interactive elements that potential learners use to explore a wide range of instructional concepts. As the world becomes ever more connected online, it was a fun and thoughtful experiment on how such a course could be transitioned into an E-learning experience that might one day be the blue print for such a course in a university or film school!
Needs
Students with an interest in filmmaking and fictional writing seek alternative and interactive ways of instruction instead of listening to lectures or a video. A motivational E-learning course that is asynchronous, allowing students to learn at their own pace, might find this as a better alternative for their needs than traditional learning environments.
Scope
The course covers concepts like story structure, genre, character archetypes, stereotypes and how it all gets incorporated into short filmmaking. However, it does touch on filmmaking fundamentals, but not the application of those fundamentals within the framework of production or actual filming.
Objective
The aim of this project is to show that it is possible for students to experience learning short film design in an efficient and flexible manner, in which an individual can use for their creative endeavors.
Design of the Project
To stay honest to the core idea of creating an asynchronous course, It’s best to create an environment that compliments that idea, and that’s exactly what I did. As something that needs to be completed fully, I also see the course as something that can be referenced repeatedly, the use of chapters, and exploratory features, which allows the learner to jump to specific content as they would like. Besides that, it’s important to create fun and motivational learning environments by implementing those interactions in specific ways that add additional value in the learning context.
When set out to design the course, I joggled many design ideas and landed on a chapter based asynchronous course where the learner has the freedom to explore the chapters how they would like, not fed a chronological slide show; this promotes the initial motivation when beginning the course, and keeps them learning. I was intended on using formative and summative assessments in the form of creating knowledge checks and a final exam, but instead deciding against it to retain motivation built through interactions, preventing breaking up learning flow.
Interactions
Design
Adobe Captivate
User Experience
As a first time learning experience using captivate for a university class on E-learning production, I jumped Into learning it immediately, as I found it enjoyable and a sort of a challenge to overcome. As with any software, it’s arduous picking up the fundamentals, but once understood on how the components, such as the timeline and triggers, work in tandem with one another, the rest was just practice.
Overcoming Hurdles
Working with states for the first time, and their correlating triggers for user actions, I would occasionally run into problems among naming conventions of the elements on the slide. This taught me to be careful and diligent when assigning names. Another concept that I found difficult was the responsive design boxes that Captivate uses.
Reflections
Conclusion
As someone who is a lover of films and filmmaking, I challenged myself to build an introductory course on the fundamentals of story design, and its place within the medium of short filmmaking. The course was designed and built using Adobe Captivate, featuring interactive elements that potential learners use to explore a wide range of instructional concepts. As the world becomes ever more connected online, it was a fun and thoughtful experiment on how such a course could be transitioned into an E-learning experience that might one day be the blue print for such a course in a university or film school!
