Communicating geoscience on social media: Harnessing the short video format

Short videos, which provide concise, clearly articulated, and engaging content on a wide variety of topics are among the most prominent formats on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The short video format is particularly well suited to the dissemination of scientific knowledge and research findings to non-specialist audiences, offering researchers a valuable means of broad societal engagement.

 

The University of Helsinki Faculty of Science trains and motivates researchers to adopt and apply the short-video format for science communication by offering the How to Make a Science Video course, jointly by the journalism program at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. The course, offered annually, is led by experienced science video producers and journalism professionals. Participants work in mixed teams comprising researchers at different career stages from master’s students to professors—together with journalism students from Haaga-Helia. The course covers, among other topics:

• Developing an initial idea into an engaging video
• Popularizing scientific concepts
• Creating effective educational videos
• Writing persuasive scripts
• Speaking and performing on camera
• Shooting and editing high-quality videos using only a smartphone
• Selecting appropriate channels and strategies for publication

Each team produces a science video of up to two minutes duration, which is published at the conclusion of the course on the YouTube channels of both institutions.

 

As part of the course in 2024, we set out to make an educational video about ancient volcanism in southern Finland.  Around 1.9 billion years ago, there was a volcanic island arc in southern Finland and outcrops of these rocks can be found in, for example, the Helsinki region. We filmed in some of these locations, interviewed a local expert and author of a book on this topic, and included an animation made by a close collaborator on how the volcanic rocks formed in our 2-minute video. Our final Youtube video and the process of making it are here used as an example of all the methods and skills we learned on the How to make a science viodeo course.