Communicate your science with video

SPIE journal authors are encouraged to create creative abstract—or “explainer”—videos that describe a research project in a way that almost anyone can understand. These nontechnical video summaries will appear with the article on the SPIE Digital Library, and will be used to promote the paper on social media.

Video is the perfect medium for science communication. Dialogue, nontechnical images, animations, props, and sound effects can all be used to explain your research project in a simple and compelling way. Video can also be quickly consumed and is easily shared on social media.

You don’t need special design skills to create an explainer video for your journal paper. They can be created with tools as simple (and free!) as Google slides or Instagram Reels.

Here are some guidelines:

1. Keep it under 90 seconds.
2. Use strong visuals such as an animated whiteboard, a visual analogy, or video from the lab.
3. Make it fun! Science is serious, but you don’t have to be.
4. Keep it high level: imagine that your audience is educated, but knows little about your research topic.
5. Avoid traditional technical slide presentations; save those for a conference.
6. Make sure the science is accurate.

Check out the three explainer videos on the right for inspiration.

If you want to create an explainer video for your accepted SPIE journal paper, send it to journals@spie.org.