Animation for training and procedures nobody reads

A procedure that lives in a document is a procedure that is read once, by the person who wrote it. Everything after that is a chain of somebody explaining it to somebody else, with a small error added at each handover, which is exactly the shape of an incident report.

The test

Ask three people to describe the procedure out loud, separately. If the three descriptions differ in the steps, not in the wording, you have a film. If they agree, the document is working and a film is a nice-to-have.

What a film does that a document cannot

• Order. A film cannot be skimmed out of sequence. Steps arrive in the order they happen.
• Consequence. Skipping a step has a visible result, which is unforgettable and cheap to show.
• Repetition without boredom. The fifth group gets the same twenty minutes as the first.
• Language independence. A large share of procedural film is understood without reading anything.

What it must not do

A training film is not a place for atmosphere. Ninety seconds is enough for a procedure if every second carries a step; three minutes of mood with the steps squeezed into the last thirty seconds is worse than the document it replaced. State the steps, show each one, show the failure, stop.

Keeping it true

Procedures change and films do not, so decide at the start which parts are likely to move. A version number and a date on the film, a short list of what triggers a re-render, and the film rebuilt from the same source rather than patched, that is the difference between a training asset and a liability.