How Osmosis Videos Are Made

Discover the magic behind Osmosis by Elsevier videos as Dr. Vincent Waldman, Head of Content Operations, spills the secrets to their production.

We’re frequently asked how we make our videos. Our videos are one of the main things we’re known for, so it’d be silly to explain how we create one of our most valuable assets, right? 

We don’t think so. 

True, we now use proprietary software to improve the quality of our videos and streamline our processes, but we made videos for years without it. The truth is creating an Osmosis-style video is relatively straightforward. However, straightforward does not mean easy; it takes a lot of skill, subject-matter expertise, and effort to create one of our videos. 

It Starts with Words

Our goal is to present complex topics in an engaging and digestible format in as short a time as possible. While many people produce medical videos in a classroom-style lecture format, we choose to create our videos with scripts to ensure that only relevant content is presented in an organized manner without distracting information. This also facilitates the review of our scripts by subject matter experts — generally clinicians and professors — to ensure the accuracy of every line of our content.

The delivery of those words is also important. We want our voiceovers to be conversational but also authoritative, which can be a difficult balance to strike. We often give the cue to our voiceover artists to deliver a voiceover like you would explain particle physics to your best friend. We also train our voiceover artists to speak at a specific cadence. Why? So that our extremely busy learners can choose to listen to us at 2x speed to save time. If the voiceover artists speak too quickly at normal speeds, they won’t be understandable at accelerated speeds.

Of course, sound quality is important, and all of our voiceover artists use decent microphones (like the Audio-Technica ATR2500-USB) in rooms with low background noise and echo. The audio recordings are also processed with audio editing software like Adobe Audition, Studio One, or Audacity (free to use) to remove retakes, mistakes, and apply digital enhancements to our voiceovers, like crossfades and equalization, to make them sound better.

Draw It Out

While our illustrations are cartoonish in nature, they must also be accurate. Therefore, we hire trained medical illustrators to create visuals for our videos. We’ve also hired medical doctors with a knack for illustration in the past. These illustrators undergo a two-month training period to learn our style and how to create our videos. That said, for the most part, the illustration software used by our team doesn’t affect the quality of the videos. Therefore, our illustrators use a variety of programs to create their visuals, like Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, or Autodesk Sketchbook (free to use). The individual illustrated components are important, but text layout and effective communication of the script are equally important! This means that our illustrators spend as much time working on scene layout and creation as they do on illustration. They break down scripts into logical scenes, add illustrated assets and text from the script, layer them in a vector file using Affinity Designer, and upload each scene to our proprietary software.

In addition to software, we consider a drawing tablet with a stylus pen essential for this work. Again, the choice of tablet doesn’t affect the finished video, so our illustrators use a variety of Wacom tablets and iPads according to their preferences. A video display on the tablet is nice to have but not a necessity.

But what about the animation? 

In the past, we didn't animate our videos in the traditional sense. The action in our videos was captured with screencasting using software like Camtasia, which is simple to use and paired with powerful video editing software. Screencasts are similar to a screenshot, but instead of capturing a still image of your computer screen, you’re recording a video of it. How this worked in practice, for example, is if you wanted to “animate” an image moving from offscreen to the middle of the screen, all you needed to do was open up your illustration software, select the image, and drag it from off-screen to the middle of the screen while you were recording the action. This method also worked for “animating” text by recording it being written out in real-time, whiteboard style, which meant lots of practice making text look attractive, legible, and as straight as possible.

Technology has come a long way, and our production process has evolved, too! We now use our proprietary software to “read” the layers of each video scene file that illustrators upload. Layers within each file have to be named in a very specific way so that our software knows how and in what order to animate them. It can easily move objects along a motion path, “Osmosify” our in-house Tannerscript font, and add an erase animation in our signature whiteboard style. This new animation method has streamlined many aspects of video production, like eliminating the tedious task of hand-writing text or removing pesky cursors that appeared in screencasts. 

Putting It All Together 

Similar to how our voiceover artists must edit their individual takes so that their recordings are one continuous voiceover, our video editors must string individually animated scenes together into a continuous flow of action. They do this by screencasting from our proprietary software as each scene plays out in sequence or by exporting the individual scene files and combining them in their video editing software. No matter how they retrieve the video scenes, video editors must clean up the footage. This might mean removing redundant pieces from a previous scene, fixing any glitches that may appear, or adjusting the overall speed to ensure that nothing appears too quickly (or too slowly).

Once you have combined the individual scenes, you must pair the visuals with the audio file. This requires chopping up the file again, many, many times, and adjusting the playback rate of the chopped-up bits. For example, most of our scenes have words from the script written out on screen. Our goal is to match the video recording to the audio recording of the word — down to the syllable. 

Video editors can also add additional animations and effects during video editing. For example, they can reposition an image, change the way an image appears, or add sound effects.  

Again, the choice of video editing software shouldn’t affect the final video. We use Camtasia for this purpose because we already used the software for screencasting. However, our video production team also uses Adobe Premiere Pro for its more powerful tools. There are powerful video editors that are available for free as well, like DaVinci Resolve. 

Alright, a Quick Recap 

We have a team of scriptwriters, editors, and subject matter experts to produce scripts, a team of voiceover artists to record and edit the voiceovers, and a team of medical illustrators who create the images and text. The images and text are animated by our proprietary software, and then everything can be edited together into a cohesive video by our team of video editors. 

While this process is straightforward — and anyone can learn it and do it with a home computer — it does take significant time and effort to do it well.

About the Author

Dr. Vincent Waldman, PhD, was hired to work with Osmosis in 2016 to create videos, but his background is in academic research. He graduated with a doctorate in Biochemistry from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Waldman joined Osmosis to continue because it offered him a chance to increase scientific literacy on a large scale. Since then, he has been involved with every step of the video production process and is currently the Director of Video Production. In this role, he manages a team of about 20 video creators and has overseen the production of over a thousand videos. When he is not working for Osmosis, Dr. Waldman enjoys landscape photography and rollerskating.

Contributors

Jillian Dunbar, Content Manager at Osmosis By Elsevier