Sometimes the best way to present information that is complex is through animated graphics. Line of Duty Death is a difficult topic to build training for because of the emotions and trauma that are included. These two animations set the tone and provide information with care, but not too overly emotional.
This is one part of a 45 minute course for sellers and servers of alcohol. Most training I have experienced for alcohol intoxication are bullet lists of indicators. If there is more, it is versions of intoxication indicators that are extreme, making it harder for people to really get an idea of what legal intoxication looks like.
We decided to do it differently. We hired 4 actors and paid them to get drunk. We recorded them twice – once giving their name and a 5 second story and once approaching the bar and ordering the drink. The bar tender decided when to cut them off and gave us the indicators for why – she nailed everyone of them at .08. Every 20 minutes we recorded their BAC and put them through field sobriety tests as a secondary opinion of intoxication.
We then used two of the actor’s progression for the course and the other two as part of the assessment – would you serve this person?
Assessments need to measure what the expected outcomes are, but they are typically done very poorly. If your performance objective requires someone to identify something, the “something” needs to be identified as close to the reality of where it will occur as possible.
So, if we are going to measure whether a participant can tell if someone is too intoxicated to be served, the participant needs to have the opportunity to make the choice. This sample assessment provides two situational multiple-choice questions and the two actors not used in the training for determining whether they should be served. Depending on the participant’s choice, they then need to select what indicators they used to decide.
Of course, the original course has more than four questions…
Sometimes the best way to present information is to explain in it as it happens. Animations are great ways to present information and changes the presentation mode to keep the participant alert and engaged.
This animation was made for an instructional design contract I was on for a bank. I had to remake it because of proprietary ownership. I wrote the script, sketched the illustrations in pencil and vectorized them in Adobe Illustrator, built the animation in Adobe After Effects, and recorded the voiceover in Adobe Audition.
This was a difficult video to make – because I had to keep taking it in and out of focus to make it look amateurish. This video was used to introduce the training team to the company, using “The Office” style gimmicks and shooting. It was a lot of fun coming up with stereotypes of what people think training does when classes aren’t going on.
Created with my Nikon D810 videographer kit and Adobe Premiere.
A promotion video for a paintball team, SAS Woodsball, Arizona chapter. I enjoyed timing the visuals to the action to give the video a nicely timed and polished feel.
Created with my iPhone 11 Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Audition, and Premiere.
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