Team member, Ellie, explains how she used Near-Life and Canva to make a fun, interactive guide to butterfly identification in the UK, which can be embedded on a website or shared directly.
Learning about butterflies has become more accessible, and interactive video can help with not only the learning, but also testing what you’ve learned. In this blog post, I will explain how I created an interactive video to teach people about different types of butterflies. I will also include a video tutorial of each stage of the process at the bottom of the page.
Planning
First up, I made a plan. This included researching some of the most common butterflies and finding out information about them. Then I thought about how I wanted the interactive video to play. I decided to categorise the butterflies by colour to break up the content while the user is learning. Then I would have a small quiz at the end to test what they’d learned. I would also offer in-depth feedback to help the user learn from any mistakes in the final report.
Canva
With an idea of how the video would go, I then went onto Canva to create the images I would need. Canva is a design platform that allows users to create stunning visuals, graphics, and animations. Using Canva’s huge range of elements, I was able to find an image for every butterfly I had picked. I also had the option to make my own butterflies by editing graphics on the site, which I made use of for later in the video. I decided that I wanted the user to click on each butterfly to learn about them, so I didn’t need to have too much text on the screen. Canva does give the option to make and download your media as a video, but I chose not to do that for this video as I thought it might be too distracting from the information.
Near-Life
In the interactive video, viewers can click on different butterflies to learn about their characteristics. I used Near-Life’s pop-up feature to do this. I set a hotspot shape around each butterfly, clicked to allow pop-ups and wrote the text I wanted to appear. I also uploaded images of each butterfly that would appear next to the text so the user could still see the one they clicked while they were learning. I also included a quiz at the end of the video where viewers can test their knowledge by identifying different species from a picture.
When I was happy everything was made, I could share it with the team for feedback. The overall verdict was that it might be a bit hard. To help manage this, I decided to include 4 orange butterflies instead of 5, and added a couple of easier questions at the end.
Video tutorial – how I made it
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