With Pictory's easy to use AI video generator, Monico is able to create impressive teaching videos for his students while cutting his time by 75%!
Introduction
Monico Candelaria is a high school social worker who engages with young audiences. He talks to us about how Pictory has freed up his time, so he can dedicate more time to one on ones.
Also, how he has found applications within Pictory, working wonders for students that have hearing difficulties or are visually impaired.
Monico Candelaria: I work in high school, I'm a school social worker similar to a counsellor. And part of my job is to develop curriculum and wellness activities for some of our students.
I use Pictory to design videos for lessons based on social-emotional learning or emotional wellness.
Pictory makes it easy for me to take the content of the lesson and make a short video about it. I can take a script that I used, and throw it into Pictory, and it will automatically create those shorter content videos for me.
Another way that I use Pictory is to support our students that may not be as technologically savvy. If they find it challenging to make their own videos I'll work with them to create really intriguing content with a lot of simplicity.
Pete Bennett: So what do you think the problem is that Pictory solves for you and what were you doing before? And how is Pictory better?
Monico Candelaria: So before I would use standard video editing software. I still use Final Cut Pro for bigger projects but what Pictory solves for me is shorter form video creation. It’s great to have access to Story Blocks and Audio Library. All those things combined make it really simple to hammer out a video pretty quickly.
So for me, my day can get busy and whenever I'm trying to help students create short-form video content for our school, it's a no-brainer to use Pictory.
I can I put in the script, it transcribes it, add a voiceover, and then I get to choose the picture I want to roll with. It makes me look really good and I don't have to really do much.
I could do it all manually and I know how to do it all on my own but it cuts down my time, probably by a quarter. Instead of spending an hour on something, I can be in and out in 15 minutes.
Pete Bennett: Wow. That's amazing. Because time is money nowadays and everybody’s really busy. That's incredible. So if you were talking to somebody who hadn't used PIctory before, and they were thinking of trying it, what would you say to them?
Monico Candelaria: I would say definitely give it a shot. It has so many applications and not just for educational purposes. It’s a great way to disseminate a lot of information very quickly. So for anyone that's a teacher or anybody that's trying to engage young people, or presenting to an educational audience, definitely give it a shot.
Pete Bennett: Do you use the “edit video to text” function? Or are you just using the “blog to text” and the “script to video”?
Monico Candelaria: I use a few different functions, the two main ones I use are the script to video. You can copy the script and paste it in, then it transcribes it and automatically overlays the imagery onto the backgrounds. The AI predicts the videos that it thinks I would like and I love how easy it is to switch those around.
The second one I use is from videos that I've already made. We have a couple of students that are deaf or hard of hearing. So what I love to do is take those videos and I throw them into PIctory. I can't remember which window it is, but it's the window that's furthest to the right (visuals to video).
I upload the video and it transcribes it. This way I get to have a caption overlay and I get to use nice big fonts instead of the standard font you get on YouTube. I get these big beautiful fonts and I can highlight the specific words that I want. So those are the two main functions that I use.
I will say one more thing that I was really impressed with. I couldn't figure out how to do a certain video upload, I didn’t realise I had been trying to upload into the wrong box. I reached out to your guys' customer service, and I had it resolved in three minutes.
The person was really quick to respond, Hey, what's going on? How can I help you? They gave me exactly the information I needed and I was off and on my way. So that was another thing that I really appreciated, just positive, really quick customer service.
Pete Bennett: Wonderful. I'll pass that on to the team.
