Northwest Justice Project Now Producing Educational Videos

In the last days of 2011, the Northwest Justice Project (NJP) debuted two new public educational videos on WashingtonLawHelp.org, the first produced entirely “in-house.”

So, why did we make them? 

NJP is charged with creating a series of instructive videos for WashingtonLawHelp.org through the federal Communities Connect Network Project (part of the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunity Program) which aims to increase access to technology and improve legal literacy for unrepresented Washingtonians.

Our English and Spanish videos about the basics of Washington’s new Foreclosure Mediation process are now publicly available on NJP’s Vimeo page here.

They are also embedded on WashingtonLawHelp.org, under the Housing Sub-Categories Foreclosure and Home buyers & Owners.

The main ideas we wanted to communicate in these videos: 

1. Some homeowners facing foreclosure now have a new option:  mediation
2. The process takes time and effort but it’s entirely possible to do it on your own
3. The process may be broken down into discrete actions
4. The mediation itself will have roles and rules, but does not have to be intimidating

The video’s larger purpose is to guide viewers to much more detailed information on WashingtonLawHelp.org and to NJP’s Foreclosure Prevention Hotline. These videos serve as a supplement to existing client resources, rather than a replacement.

So, how did we make it? 

This video took a couple months to produce, but most of that time was taken up by writing, editing and reviewing the script for accuracies and omissions. Our methods can easily be replicated at other organizations who, like us, have limited financial and staff resources devoted to video production. 

I worked mostly on a Mac, but these videos could just have easily been made with PowerPoint, Windows Photo Gallery, and Windows Live MovieMaker. I used a digital video camera to gather pictures and sound, Apple’s iPhoto to touch-up the photos, Keynote (a slide presentation program) to layer the photos, create graphics and simple animations, and iMovie to stitch the photos and sound together and add some simple  transitions. 

The opening 10-second introduction (where a restless, hand-drawn house drives along a “long and bumpy” legal landscape of construction paper cut-outs) is meant to catch viewers’ attention; I thought bright colors, fast movement and an unusual but somewhat sympathetic character would do so.

This simple animation is actually a series of 50 presentation slides created in Keynote. I altered each one slightly from the previous one (moving the “house-car” a tiny bit), and then exported the series of slides into JPEGS. I dropped these 50 or so still photos into iMovie and assigned them a very short run-time, or .2 seconds each, creating a 10-second animation that catches the viewer’s eye and then gets out of the way.

We conceived of a “gameboard” pathway for the informational meat of the video, (the actual step-by-step process of requesting, preparing for, and then attending a foreclosure mediation). The House proceeds along the path, conveying that a homeowner can’t “skip a step” and also showing the steady progress towards the goal of the process—staying in one’s home with a loan modification. These images were also created in Keynote using colored text boxes layered with a JPEG of the House character.

I quickly created the image of the “gameboard” path itself in Google SketchUp, an intuitive, free 3-D modeling program, which you should definitely play around with if you have any interest in visual image-making. 

Animation vs. Live Action

The attorneys at NJP who requested I make this video also wanted to prepare pro se homeowners for the mediation itself, and show them what the room might look like, and who would be there and what to do. 

We contemplated acting out a live mediation scene, using volunteer attorneys for actors. Given our tight production schedule and budget, I suggested a hand-drawn scene might convey the same information, and lessen logistical challenges and the need for better sound and lighting equipment to make a professional-looking scenario. Thus, our “Mediation Room” is another set of hand-drawn characters in a construction paper room, layered in Keynote and stitched together in iMovie. 

I felt more confident in my inclination towards animation, after talking to Elena Renderos, Media Services Coordinator, at the People’s Law School (PLS) in Vancouver, British Columbia. I decided to ask her about their process because I really liked their series of videos PLS had produced on consumer credit and debt issues.

PLS decided to use animations instead of live-action videos because they felt animations would be more accessible to a wider audience, from youth to seniors. Like NJP, PLS already had an extensive series of legal educational fact sheets, written by an attorney who had expertise with the principles of Plain Language writing. PLS then hired an animator to write video scripts based on these fact sheets (which was my role here at NJP). Other attorneys then reviewed the scripts for accuracies, omissions, and oversimplifications. 

She mentioned that the translation process for videos was slightly more complicated than the translation of legal documents or printed fact-sheets. Because of the nature of the videos, short stories with characters who speak with conversational slang, PLS had to ask local speakers to make tweaks to the script to maintain the videos’ essential meaning and humorous tone. Some further editing of the visual images is also required with each new languages involved due to the nature of the languages pacing itself (e.g. it can take a longer or shorter time utter a sentence in Farsi than in English). For example, our Spanish video is about a minute longer than our English video, although our narrators spoke at a similar pace. 

Having decided to use animation, it was easy to record our Spanish and English voice-overs at a convenient time for our narrators, without having to worry about staging, costuming, and sets. Making a video out of a series of presentation slides as I did, it was relatively easy to adjust the time of each slide to conform to the length of each sound-bite and then the same images could be re-used after just swapping out the translated text boxes. We will be translating this video into Korean as well and it should be a fairly easy job to dub over the same slides and add Korean titles.

We have many other videos in various states of production, and will be rolling them out soon. We are setting up NJP’s new non-profit YouTube Channel to host our new video library and link to other organizations’ educational and promotional videos and relevant newscasts. 

Let me know if you have any questions about the technical aspects of the video production process and I can elaborate on it in my next post.