-Moderator Approved-
Long-time lurker here, and I recently started doing some videos that aim to do pretty much the same thing Cecil’s been doing for years: bring interesting and supported information to the populace. The idea is that there’s an audience for short, personal videos on youtube, and some topics really benefit from the visual aid.
Anyway, to get to the point, does anyone have a topic that might work well for this medium?
If you’re interested, it might be worth checking our current stuff as examples:
Chemotherapy and How it Works- our first one, but also the one we did for family/friends What Is Chemotherapy? And How Does It Work? - YouTube
Booze, Drugs and your Brain (Part 1 of 2: the second part will involve serotonin and dopamine)- How Drugs and Booze affect your Brain - YouTube
We really enjoyed making these, but we need suggestions on where to go next, and what people’d like to see. We’ve got a few ideas right now, but if anyone has a general question/topic they’d like explained in a very straightforward way, or a suggestion for how ‘science-heavy’ vs ‘approachable and casual’ you think the videos should be, please let us know! We can get each video done within a week or two. So tell us, SDMB, what do you think?
I would recommend getting familiar with the backcatalog of Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, SciShow, the CrashCourses for Biology, Chemistry and Ecology, MinutePhysics, Vsauce and maybe Vi Hart and the Brain Scoop and then see where they’ve left something unexplained or areas that they haven’t ventured into. To be honest, there’s quite a few channels on youtube already that emphasize bite-sized edutainment info. I think the best question to think about is what is going to make your videos stand out.
After your first two, I’d suggest a video on how anesthesia works as a related topic.
This is a good point- if you want to learn things, there’s a trove of it online. If you learn interesting facts, there’s vsauce and some of the others you mentioned. But if you want to be entertained by interesting people, there’s stuff like Hexaflexagon and even to an extent Feynman.
I guess we’re going for something like that, but with a focus on the things that affect you in your daily life.
This is brilliant! While we discussed the idea of branching into more general science topics, we’ve also got a nurse on the project who wants to tell folks about more of the things they undergo when they go to a hospital. Maybe the series could become more of a medical “here’s how some of the terrifying, impersonal stuff really works” series?