Manhattan Project²

The video you just watched is the result of our first project of the year, the Manhattan Project Project.¹ My last post was actually for this very same project, where I set my intentions as to what I’d be interested in learning. Since then, I’ve been hard at work, creating my video to explain an impact of the creation of the first atomic weapons. If you watched my video, it should be pretty clear that my main point was that the Manhattan Project led to the US National Labs system. It might be hard to see why that matters, especially if you don’t happen to live in the US, like I do. Ultimately, the national labs are a centre for innovation within the United States, and fill a niche between university labs, and private companies.² Conveying the true scale of this in my video was tricky so I tried to focus more on singular events and achievements letting you (the viewer) paint the bigger picture yourselves. At the very least, it made finding visuals easier.

Research (took a while)

My video’s topic was the US national labs system, but that’s not the topic I started with. My first topic was the manhattan project’s impact on large-scale project management. After a good bit of research that seemed to mostly support this idea. I was still looking for somewhat of a smoking gun, one clear thing I could use to explain the connection to the present day. I eventually found it within a 30-page research paper that at first glance looked like it was just what I needed. Unfortunately, the barrel was aimed directly at my topic and the trigger had been pulled.

To keep a long story short, I pivoted.

I briefly toyed with the idea of talking about the funding idea I mentioned in my intentions post, but it seemed like another fairly dense topic for a 3 minute video. I eventually settled on something that had been popping up throughout my research, the US National Labs, which is what I stuck with. Throughout this project, an important tool was my:

Zettelkasten³

Around 65% of the Zettels I made this project were literature notes, which in my system act as a reference to my impressions of a source. Generally, they had a summary of everything that stood out to me, some other quotes numbers or data, and other errata. They all came out a bit differently structurally, but here’s a somewhat typical one, and the overall structure of this project.

As I mentioned before our Zettelkasten is something that continually grows throughout the course of a project as we create new notes, expand previous ones, and synthesize our own ideas based on them. This is definitely something I managed to do in this project. I made a lot of good sourcing notes, and my connection structures are pretty nice. I didn’t make as many permanent notes as I’d like and I also didn’t make as much use of them in my final video. In the rest of the year I’m going to try and focus more on synthesizing ideas in permanent notes, and actually making use of them.

Planning

Moving on from my second research sprint, things went relatively smoothly aside from the fact I was about a week behind from a combination of the pivot and a particularly nasty cold. For planning purposes, 3 minutes isn’t a very long time when it comes down to it, so I had to crunch down my (already reduced) scope a lot⁴. Realizing I over researched a bit came as part of the storyboarding process⁵, which I took as an opportunity to commit to a visual style, that I might have spent a little too much time thinking about.⁶

Animation

Animating the video was a mildly unpleasant experience. Keynote can do a lot of different things, but I’m afraid that precise and expressive animation is not one of them.⁷ My process for animating a slide was:

1. Listen to the VO and revisit my storyboard to get a general idea of the actions I needed
2. Find or create the individual assets needed
3. Lay out all the assets at their initial positions in the frame ( or part of it for more complex scenes )
4. Animate with the timings I think would fit for a small section ( referencing a time-coded transcription )
5. Re-watch the section, and refine the timings until it matches the audio
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the slide is done

Here’s one of the longest build orders I ended up with. In retrospect, it really should’ve been two separate scenes but splitting the audio was annoying enough I didn’t want to do it any more than absolutely necessary.

About 95% of the video is exactly what was exported from Keynote, the only other post-processing I did was shortening some slow scene transitions, cutting out some silence, and re-synching the audio in places where timings were affected by lag. If I’d had more time, I really would’ve liked to add some sound effects, but after 15 hours of Keynote animation I was done. I know we’ll be showcasing these videos soon, so I might make a remastered version for that.

Post-mortem

I’ve been failing to mention one thing that featured quite prominently in my intentions post, and that was the expert. I was never quite able to fully conceptualize why we needed an expert, or how to fit them into our process. This unfortunately made it hard to find people to contact. I ended up reaching out to about 5 different people, only one of which responded to say my topic was outside their range of knowledge. If we do something similar with experts in the future, I think that if I want any chance of success I’ll have to email more people even earlier with a much clearer vision of what I want to get out of it.

Overall I don’t think this project will be amongst my favourites of the year, but that’s ok. Moving forwards I think my biggest takeaway is to not get bogged down in the details or committed to one specific vision because ultimately done is better than perfect.