New guy, trying Synfig for teaching/outreach

Hi all,

My name’s Tony, I’m a ph.d. candidate in political science at Lund university in Sweden. I’ve been trying to employ some graphical design in my teaching (I currently teach courses on theoretical approaches to international conflicts and the UN to first-semester students in Peace and Conflict Studies) and conference presentations for several years, mostly using Powerpoint. Not because I love Powerpoint, but in order to ensure compatibility.

Right now I’m trying my hand at taking this a step further by creating a simple project presentation in Synfig, so that I can upload it on Youtube and thus distribute it on a broader scale. It’s all very basic, pretty much a slide show with crude animated elements (zooming, moving text, etc) narration and possibly some background music.

Since I’ve been into open source for quite a few years, I was looking for FOSS to use for animation (I’ve used GIMP for years for my slides) and I’m very happy that I found Synfig. So far, it’s been quite easy to do what I want, and the project is proceeding. It was easy to learn enough to do what I need to do right now, and I’m very impressed by how flexible it is.

Kudos to all the people who’ve dedicated their time and energy to developing this amazing piece of software! You can be assured that I’ll make sure to mention Synfig when I present my finished product.

welcome to the forum… ,

Great project you are doing ! and Synfig working for global peace ! :wink:
If then you want to make a report (tutorial?) on how doing great presentation with synfig, you are also welcome.

Edit13:50 Maybe you used this slideshow tuto to realize your work … can be a good place for feedback.

see(:ta*

Thanks d.j.a.y.! I’ve already consulted the slidehow tutorial, good stuff. It got me up and running in no time. So far, I’ve been able to do what I want to do, so now I can start to think about how to improve it in terms of sophistication and efficiency. The basic idea is to create something that looks a bit like the run-of-the-mill documentaries about WWII (panning/zooming on photographs, the odd film reel, animated maps/text), and then fill it with academic content, hopefully making for a better user experience than the taped lectures and conference presentations that are commonplace in academia today.

Have you taught about using kickstarter/indiegogo to for this idea?

It’s an interesting idea, but right now money won’t help me. I need to convince my department to back this project. Right now I’m using up some of my own research hours to develop a brief project presentation to provide outreach for my own research, but if I’m to do the same with teaching material, then I need them to grant me more teaching hours, or I’ll lose research time working on it. I’m at the mercy of my superiors, but hopefully I’ll be able to convince them once I have something to show. If it had been a research project, then I might have been able to use external funding, but that doesn’t apply to teaching, at least I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.