Should I use self-made animations in my scholarly presentations? What do you think about the addition of animations to powerpoint presentations? I'm not talking about the generic animations that can be added to powerpoint slides, but the use of animated films to illustrate a concept (I'm in biology by the way). 

Despite going into the sciences, I've always had a love for the visual arts, and have been teaching myself animation for the past little while. I think it can be used as a great way of communicating scientific concepts, and will also likely make me stand out in a room full of graduate students. However, I'm not sure if this could possibly back-fire and make me seem less serious about the science? The type of animation I plan on making would hopefully be on par with ones made by professional medical animators. 

I'm also a little unsure of the intellectual property aspects of this process. I have made short animations for my presentations before, and although people were quite impressed, my old supervisor seem to think that she (along with everyone else in the lab) could simply start to use my animation in their presentations. I didn't have a problem with this arrangement since it was my first animation, and I definitely was not expecting to be paid for it. However, as I'm starting graduate school and entering a different lab, I would be a little hesitant to agree if it were to happen again, now with animations I've spent a considerable amount of time working on (especially if I will not be the first one presenting it since I'm a new student). I'm currently thinking about showing an animation I made to a PI that I hope to work with in the end (made specifically to illustrate her research). Although I want to impress this person who I think is a great scientist, I also don't want to be taken "advantage" of... Would it be unrealistic to be paid for some of my work during graduate school?
Nate and cbeleites have handled well the finer points of the advisability of making the animations. I would encourage you to go ahead with them, but there are a large number of detail-dependent considerations that need to be made. I want to weigh in on the intellectual-property aspect of your question.


  Would it be unrealistic to be paid for some of my [animation] work during graduate school?


In a word, yes. You are already being paid to produce research and its corresponding dissemination materials. Asking your group to pay extra for a specific class of dissemination material will strike people as odd and probably as very selfish. I think it is unlikely that anyone will agree to this and you risk alienating your group and the rest of the community.

In addition to this, I do not think you should attempt to limit the spread of your animations. Instead, get ahead of the market, and engineer a situation where (i) people will want to share and use your animations, and (ii) people using your animations will bring credit to you and your group. More specifically:


Make sure all your animations identify you as the author, and your university and research group. Make this visible enough that viewers will see it and have enough time to register it, but discreet enough that users of your animations will not be tempted to remove it or skip over it.
Keep your animations publicly available in a visible and discoverable place online. This can be a YouTube channel, GitHub repository, university webpage, something else, or some combination of the above. Make it easy for people to find the animations from you, instead of getting nth-hand copies from someone in their lab. 

This online space can then grow to include, say, your research papers, potentially turning some of your animations traffic into interested readers of your publications. This gives you as direct a benefit to your career from your animations as you can really hope for.
Provide clear licensing details for your animations, which could be CC-BY or CC-BY-ND. Make this clear but concise and easy to follow. It is up to you to gauge your audience, but I would claim that people are much more likely to use your content in ways that you would like if you (1) actively give them permission to use it, and (2) clearly state the ways you would and would not like your content to be used. If you provide your animations under CC-BY and state as the attribution requirement that people provide a link to your repository, you are creating a contract of sorts between you and those users, which adds a barrier on their side of the channel (they need to actively breach the contract to misuse the content).

Moreover, if you do this early then you can get ahead of the game and set clear rules for how you want your own research group to treat the animations. Make it easy for people, and particularly for your own group, to know how to credit you, and they are very likely to do it.


Academia is a weird place, and there are many ways to be compensated for work which are not monetary. (Think, for example, of journal editors and paper referees, who perform their jobs on a voluntary basis, in the understanding that they are service activities that actively contribute to their standing in the community, and therefore indirectly to the visibility of their research, their avenues for further collaborations, and ultimately them keeping their day jobs.) You should not expect direct financial compensation from your animations, but there is no reason why you can't market on them and use them to further your career. You just need to be somewhat more clever about it.

In this sense, the situation admits a clear analogy to the (sad) state of the music publishing industry over the past twenty years or so. People are going to pass around your animations, whether you want it or not, in much the same way that people are going to share music illegally if it is the cleanest way to obtain it. The music industry we have spends all its resources trying to clamp down on this, with little effect beyond alienating people; don't be like them. Instead, be like the music industry we wish we had: actively trying to harness the new technologies and media to generate new, fresh, legal ways to get the content, that actually make you want to use them. This is what I mean by beating the market.