Hi, all.
(short version at the bottom)
Here’s what we need (tell me if it already exists): a sort-of-interactive instructional Flash video about the Austrian business cycle theory.
Motivation: I believe the Austrian business cycle to be one of the flagship theories of Austrian economics. It’s profound, not terribly difficult to understand, and it is highly applicable to both the crisis we’re in now and previous ones that everyone knows about (Great Depression, etc.), so I think it’d be easy to get a lot of people hooked on Austrian economics if we properly instructed them about the business cycle in a fun, entertaining, and, most importantly, accessible manner.
What it should attempt to look like: www.CrisisOfCredit.com – if you haven’t looked at this yet, do so. It doesn’t pin the blame on anyone (in contrast to what I’d like our Flash video on the business cycle to do, however tactfully), but it looks fantastic, is well-narrated, and it is accessible to just about any quasi-intelligent person.
What would be special about our video: we would offer a long and short version of the theory, which would work as follows: the ‘main’ video would likely kept around 10 minutes or less, with little pauses/waypoints along the way, ideally after some potentially confusing concept, that would let the user either continue with the main video (the one that is less than 10 minutes long) or take a temporary detour to ‘drill down’ further into some concept that they don’t understand, such as the purchasing power of money or some other term that may be familiar to those more familiar with economics. These detour videos should be short, maybe 3-5 minutes tops, so as to not disillusion the average viewer from getting to the meat and bones of the theory, available from the main video. At the end of each detour video, the viewer would be taken back to the waypoint in the main video and would choose to either continue with the main video or to view more short detour videos on other concepts glossed over in the main video. So for someone pretty familiar with general economic concepts, it’d take 10 minutes to understand (and hopefully be convinced of the legitimacy of) the Austrian theory of the business cycle, and maybe 30 minutes (tops) to go through every single little detour video in addition to the main video for someone not familiar with economics at all. We would probably want to offer a ‘save’ or ‘remember me’ functionality for someone who stopped halfway through so that they could continue watching at a later time.
Why Flash: the format of this should simply be a long video (with little detour videos along the way), but we would want some minimal user interaction so that when the user is presented with the option to watch detour videos, they wouldn’t just be clicking links that opened up more windows/tabs, convoluting the whole process. Rather, it would all happen in this single little portal, and, again, would look a whole lot like and be just as self-contained as CrisisOfCredit.com. Of course, the main video (the 10 minute one) and all the detour ones could individually be uploaded to youtube as well at the sacrifice of interactivity, but so long as we had a link to our website (maybe abctheory.com or something catchy) from each of the YouTubes, that’d be fine.
Where to start: I know enough Flash to do this and do this pretty well. I wouldn’t be able to do as many nifty special effects as the guy on CrisisOfCredit.com does (rather effectively, IMO), but it would still look pretty good. We’d need someone with a good narrating voice (I could give it a shot, but I’m a bit nasally). We’d also probably want some sort of Wiki to settle on exactly what we’d want the narrator to say, as well as ideas about any visuals we’d want. I could arrange a Wiki and, again, could do the Flash work unless someone with superior abilities offered to help. Anyone else have any skills they could pitch in?
Cliffnotes:
-We need a pretty, fun, and accessible video that explains the Austrian theory of the business cycle
-This would be done in Flash
-It would consist of a main video, roughly 10 min long, with short and optional detour videos along the way that go into more detail about concepts glossed-over in the main video
-I know enough Flash to do this well, but anyone who has some decent experience with Flash and an eye for good quality visuals should offer to help and maybe lead the way
-We need a good narrating voice
-We’d need a Wiki to organize the spoken and visual content of the video(s)
Any takers? I hope someone else in the world is excited about this idea as I am.
Also, is there a better forum to post this in?
Also, is there anything like this in existence? There’s a 3 part YouTube that talks about the theory, but it’s pretty poor quality.
Thanks,
Alex