Video Skills Enhancement as Design Team Goal
Since the rise of short formed video and motion being used as marketing and self expression, the design team would also like to give full effort into supporting the quality and output of video related projects in all areas, including product concept designs, video content curation and marketing visuals. Video and Motion also provided the team new learning challenges to engage in, and enhancing knowledge and practice of honing this skill is something the whole team would like to work on together.
Therefore for one of our 6 month goal setting sessions, we came up with a goal:
Each member in the Visual Design team becomes skilled with at least one video specialty through learning and practice
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Part 1: Identifying Learning Goal
Since video skills includes several aspects: Motion Graphics Animation, Filming & Editing, etc, and each member have different levels of skillset towards these skills. We have each designer write down their current level and familiarity towards these professions, in order for us to understand what aspects they would each like to further enhance on:
Part 2: Setting Up Suitable Courses
After understanding every one’s strengths and goals, I worked along our Senior Designer to figure out our learning plan and suitable agenda. Eventually we broke our learning goal down to 3 parts:
- Group Learning Course - Have the design team learn something new together as a whole
- Pair Learning Course - Pairing 2 designers with similar skillsets to learn and discuss a specific learning topic
- Knowledge Sharing Workshop - Have designers that has knowledge in a specific field to host a workshop with fellow team members
A. Group Learning Course - Art Direction & Creativity in Movement
Learning art direction in motion graphics is something the whole team can related to and easily engage in. Therefore we setup weekly learning time to watch and discuss the video course together that breaks down the step by step for art direction and actual execution for motion graphics.
Furthermore, we also set up a time for everyone to complete the homework mentioned in the course, so in the end every one got to exercise their creative brain and shoot something short and simple based on what they learned from the video.
B. Pair Learning Course Based on Individual Goal
Since every member has different skillsets and different goals, we decided to pair designers that has more similar skill levels and learning goals together, and found suitable online courses for them to watch together. We believe having a partner to learn together will be more effective that assigning a course for every individual, since this way you will have someone to share and discuss with.
When selecting the course, we also took the length into consideration, so that the course can be long enough to be informative and helpful, but not so long that it will take up too much of their work time.
Each group is also required to share their progress and what they created based on their learning during our weekly syncs, in order to keep track of the effectiveness of the course.
C. Knowledge Sharing Workshops
We have some talented members that already possess specific knowledge related to video shooting and motion, so we also asked them to host workshops that are not just for our designers, but also open to members from different departments who are interested in learning more video and motion related skills. So that the whole team can benefit from these learnings.
- Workshop 1 - Basics in Video Shooting and Pre-Production
- Workshop 2 - Applying Lottie from After Effects
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It wasn’t easy setting up a learning goal for a team, especially when learning such a broad topic like video and when each member have different levels of understanding towards the topic. But overall after the 6 month goal all the members are able to create something interesting and creative out of our learning courses, and also had a lot of fun along the way.
It was highly rewarding to see the Visual Design team gain a deeper understanding in video and motion, and being able to put their knowledge into practice!