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Lydia K. '14, MEng '16▾

Lydia K. '14, MEng '16

Course 6-7 & 18 & Princess of the Internet

A few minutes north of the Charles River and the rest of campus is a 117-year-old building shaped vaguely like two stacks of donuts—Random Hall, MIT’s smallest dorm, founded on leap day of a leap year and soon turning 11. On the third floor, behind the purple door with the Pennsylvania truck... read more »

Cows, Cheese, and Myristic Acid, Oh My!

(notice a pattern?), I also took an experimental, part-edX class called Creating Digital Learning Materials for Biology, 7.S390, through the [email protected] program, which allowed me to live in East Campus for free, bond with Ceri R. ‘16, who was also taking 7.S390, and learn how to make educational materials, including educational videos.

At the time, I was thinking a lot about the foods I eat and their effect on my health. Specifically, I was curious about fat, which I simultaneously took pains to avoid (that skim milk) and ate a lot of (that pizza, steak, and cheese) and about which I had gotten many conflicting messages.

Over the summer I read everything I could get my hands on about fat and nutrition and condensed what I learned into a nine-minute educational video. Here’s what I found out:

Process

It might look like I am sketching cows and cheeses live. In fact, I drew them in pencil, traced them in pen, scanned them in Hayden Library, and recorded my screen with Quicktime as I erased them line by line in Photoshop. Then I recorded myself reading my script in 18 pieces selected from 35 takes (turns out reading out loud with consistent enthusiasm is difficult) into a fancy microphone, and painstakingly sped up snippets of the reversed erasing clips to match them up with my speech in (a free trial of) Final Cut Pro, which was the only video editing software I could find that allowed both reversing a video and speeding it up a lot.

Here are my script, the competed sketches, and the eraser I used next to its happier twin:

Some Notes

All that pizza is from Za, an amazing pizza restaurant in Kendall Square that you should all go to if you like pizza (and salad (and salad on your pizza (and other carbs on your carbs))).