In this blog team member Ellie describes how she was able to use Vyond and Near-Life to make an animated interactive video on behalf of St John Ambulance, a volunteer-led, charitable non-governmental organisation dedicated to the teaching and practice of first aid and the support of the national emergency response system in England.
I recently made this interactive video with Vyond and Near-Life for St John Ambulance to demonstrate the correct protocol when someone appears to be choking.
You might watch a video like this and assume it took a lot of hard work, planning, and expensive technology to build. But really, it couldn’t have been any simpler.
The powerful capabilities of Vyond enable you to create almost any animated scenario you can think of, with various templates, styles and even a character building feature.
And with Near-Life, you can easily make any scene interactive in no time.
Not only does this boost engagement, which in turn increases audience retention, but it also gives you insights into how your audience or team are interacting with the content you’ve shared.
Here’s how to create an animated interactive video yourself
To start with, you should build a map on Near-Life to work out what you want the journey of your interactive video to look like. You should also decide whether you want the user to click on the screen to give their answers, or whether you will give them button options to choose between. This is the map that we started with to build the St John Ambulance interactive video.
As you can see, each orange node indicates a decision point, where the user will be asked a question and will need to make a decision. In this case, the user will be asked the same series of questions regardless of the answers that they give. However, you may choose to have a branching pathway instead, which could result in users reaching different conclusions depending on the decisions they have made.
For more details about how to build the map, as well as a real-time walk through of an interactive video being made, be sure to check out our recent blog.
Once you have built your map, you’ll want to start using Vyond to build scenes that coordinate with your video and the timings. So you should remember that the user will need enough time to make each decision they’re faced with, and build your scenes with that in mind.
When you add button groups on Near-Life, they will take up a portion of the screen and may cover some of the content behind them. Therefore, you should make sure the scenes you build have enough space for the buttons, where they won’t be covering anything important behind them. You should then save and download each different scene you’ve built in Vyond with an appropriate name. Alternatively, you could download all of your scenes in one video and then clip each scene where you want it using video editing software.
Once you’ve made and downloaded all of your scenes, including an introduction and an ending, you can upload your media to Near-Life. You’ll then need to go onto each node to put the right scene in the right place, or drag and drop each scene to the right place from the media library in the bottom right of the screen. It really is as simple as that!
This is what the final map on Near-Life looks like for our interactive video.
Want to know more?
Click here to learn more about how Vyond and Near-Life work well together, or book a demo to speak with one of our team.
Or, if you’re already confident it’s right for you, you can get started right away with a free trial.