How it's made: Deke vs. Tom Cruise

Special effects, cutting-edge video recording techniques, and high-end video production aren't just for blockbuster Hollywood films anymore. In the right hands, these tools can also help you learn better -- which is especially helpful if you happen to work at a company that provides video-based training.

Having been an author myself, teaching Illustrator through the years, I've always embraced video training, believing that actually showing how something works is better than simply writing about it. At the same time, simply capturing a computer screen or setting up a video camera in the back of a classroom doesn't really take advantage of all that video has to offer. There are conceptual topics and ideas that can be expressed and explained visually by combining video and graphics.

To better illustrate this concept, I thought I'd offer a peek behind the scenes of how Deke McClelland and lynda.com took that idea and actually made it work -- beginning with an innovative introduction to his chapter on how to use the Levels command in Photoshop to make tonal adjustments to an image (from the course Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate).

How did Deke and lynda.com do it? Well, let's take a closer look at one of Deke's movies from his follow-up course, Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Advanced, where Deke talks about how the Curves adjustment in Photoshop works. To create this movie, the awesome production team at lynda.com worked with Deke to make the magic happen. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how the actual video shoot went -- I was lucky enough to be at the studios that day to watch the process, where Deke explained it as "full on Minority Report live action". Deke gives Tom Cruise a run for his money on this one...

Once the video was captured, it was sent over to the graphics department, where the footage was merged with the Histogram and the Curve.

The final result looks like this:

This is perhaps just one example of the innovative work lynda.com is doing with its authors. For a peek into an author's perspective on how a lynda.com course comes to life, check out this post from illustrator extraordinaire Von Glitschka, who documented his experience.