What Is the Greenhouse Effect?: Educational Animation from NASA Climate Kids
Our team at NASA Climate Kids has a very popular article explaining the greenhouse effect to young audiences -- it is currently the #1 hit that results from the Google query "What is the greenhouse effect?". Since there is growing evidence that content creators can increase the accessibility of their products by presenting the same information via different media, we decided to make this popular article into a short video appropriate for third to sixth grade students.
The finished video made an impact on our organization by raising awareness of NASA climate science research to a much younger audience than NASA's traditional channels usually reach. We used creativity and elements of fun in the animation style and an age-appropriate script to capture this audience's attention.
Our users seemed to really enjoy this content on YouTube; the video almost immediately became one of the top viewed videos on our channel with almost 5,000 views in the first two weeks and an 73% average view duration. Additionally, the video quickly captured the top video spot for the Google search query "What is the greenhouse effect?"
We met our objectives by creating a simple, fun explanation of the greenhouse effect, while also sharing an audience-appropriate introduction to NASA Climate science research. And by presenting this information in a video to complement our already-popular text article, we boosted the accessibility of this important content to reach a wider audience.
Adobe tools used:
Adobe Illustrator was used to create all the illustrations used on the animation and keeping everything within our established style.
Adobe After Effects was used to animate the assets created in illustrator.
Adobe Media Encoder was used to output the After Effects file to an MP4 format.
