RSA Animate is Great! What a Way to Present!

I just finished watching an animation about psychology. I watched it with complete and utter attention and retained the points that it made. Here it is:

Now, it turns out that the style of animation used here is called Whiteboard Animation, and RSA, whatever they are, have a whole lot of it. (Well, 16, so far). You can see the videos on the RSA website or on its Youtube channel.

You know, if I were a high school student with a film project or a presentation to do, I'd really throw myself into mastering how to do animations like these. It would lead to very good things.
-----------------------------------
Update:

So, there are various approaches. The simplest is to use a real whiteboard and a real marker along with a normal digital camera. You don't get the hand and marker in the picture, though. Here's how:

 A step up in difficulty gives you the marker and hand. Jeannel King has three blog articles on how she creates these videos professionally. The how-to is here.

The third approach does not actually have a whiteboard at all. Either the hand, the marker, the board, and the drawings are all on Photoshop layers and the animation comes from a screen recorder, or a specialized program like Livescribe Desktop gets used.

A variation on that theme is creating the animation on an iPad.

Now, I use computer graphics clumsily. Anything other than simple cropping and rescaling needs a trip to on-line resources. On the other hand, I think that working to reproduce a good storyboard on a whiteboard could achieve a very good set of pictures that are ready to become a stop-motion animation. That's the next problem to solve. This web page shows how to use free programs such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to do this. Since I don't have either a Mac nor Windows, I might try typing a few commands into a terminal window to do the job.

Fortunately, the same techniques can be used for more ambitious animations. Check out the sequence with the fruit at around 2:15 in this music video ("Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel) and see if it gives you any ideas.

If you're very, very smart, you might even be able to figure out how to make a video like this one ("Leave It" from the album 90125 by Yes). I believe it is my favourite music video of all time.