A few years ago I used moviepy to make the animated user-test videos in [1]. The idea was to create science education videos using a software-like process of it

A few years ago I used moviepy to make the animated user-test videos in [1]. The idea was to create science education videos using a software-like process of iterative development and guerrilla street usability testing. Traditional science education videos are created by sort of a waterfall process. Throw the script/footage/video over the wall, and just hope it kind of works when it hits users. But it seems this usually doesn't work - prolifically creating misconceptions, while failing to provide transferable understanding. Ok for a "motivational speaker" role, but not for a "tutor". Someone at a leading educational video shop once told me 'sure, it would be great to make user testing part of our development - just as soon as we find anyone willing to fund that'. Regrettably, my videos didn't user test well. The exercise didn't converge, and was abandoned. I had envisioned an incremental process, of informal testing for appeal, understanding and misconceptions, while improving clarity of explanation. Instead, what I found was a minefield. Bacteria and viruses get bad press, so for some "a fun story about bacteria!" has the emotion tone of "a fun story about genocide!". An elderly British gentleman was distressed by the mention of "millimeters", which brought back unhappy memories of learning metric as a child. An MIT student was disturbed by the viscerals of breaking off the head of a T4 phage (zoomed to chicken-size). Someone ran away exclaiming "how could you show me something so disgusting?!", for reasons unknown, but perhaps from having not understood anything, and thus seeing a pile of E.coli, as a pile of poo. Lot's of "oh my, I certainly didn't anticipate that failure mode". And this wasn't long-tail variance - I wasn't testing enough to see any. This kind of nonlinearity seemed common case. I also hit some newby with "insufficient domain expertise on tap" mistakes, like underestimating the interference effects between spoken and written input - having a character speaking visible text works startlingly poorly. I wrapped moviepy in a framework to create lots of minor variants for testing... class NovX4 (FilmCommon2): default_shots = 'context','question','realsize','zooming','views','playset','buildings','measure','stories' question_shots = 'question_how','question_sizes','question_planets','question_atoms' with the animations timed to recorded speech (the computer voices I had available didn't test well)... "How can you remember, the sizes of small things?" question_how_script = aka(am18.HowCanYouRemember) question_sizes_script = aka(am18.TheSizesOfThings) and animation code sharing using inheritance and mixins and injection and ... class NovX6 (NovX4): def question_sizes_frame (self,t,d): ca = self.setup_table() ca.teacher().draw() ca.side_table() ca.room.mv(.2,.55).gs().otp().rotate(.2).draw_milli(image_of_book_life_size_zoo).gr() ca.room.mv(.0,.3).gs().otp().rotate(.4).draw_milli(image_of_pizza_slice).gr() if t > d * .5: ca.room.mv(.3,.4).gs().otp().rotate(-.2).draw_milli(image_of_walking_cat).gr() self.teardown() Doing programmatic video production had some nice properties, vis a traditional video animation pipeline. It was easier to revise past decisions, to support a set of active and evolving tests, and thus to explore possibility space. Without my being a "redraw this scene for the tenth time this morning" magically-fast skilled animation artist. But some things would have been much easier with a normal direct-manipulation UI. And there was a slippery slope of reinventing wheels ("oh, I guess I need to add feature X to the character rigging to get that effect :("). If I were starting on it today, years later... I'd likely use python and Blender instead. For the ecosystem. I was pushing moviepy well outside its normal use case. [1] The stick-figure videos, in the top How to remember sizes section, of the slowly-loading wasn't-intended-to-be-public page http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms .