One of our more challenging jobs has been the construction of a homepage demo video for a top five independent alternative fund administration company.

We worked with Butterfield Fulcrum via their London office to create this homepage demo video that explains their services to first-time website visitors, you can see the video on their homepage and below.

The challenge was to communicate the integration of their processes, people and technology without getting bogged down in detail.  We also needed to tell a high-level story that would be relevant to possible clients and their investors since investors increasingly want transparency in the managing of their money, even though they may not use the system themselves.

“We believe that screencasting is a compelling new way of marketing our company and the team at ProCasts were true professionals and a pleasure to work with.” – Sheona Griffiths

We ran a workshop with Butterfield Fulcrum to fully understand their software, their clients and the needs of possible viewers.  From there we constructed several story ideas and concepts for the animated segments.  Richard created animation concepts, the story formed and after several draft videos we settled on the correct story.  You can see the finished video below:

If you’d like a homepage demo video that explains your product then just get in contact.

We’re very pleased to deliver another homepage screencast, this tour explains Remi Delon’s excellent WebFaction web hosting system.  Also see Remi’s announce.

In this screencast we tell the story of a new user who is looking for hosting:

• He knows that he wants a powerful hosting system with shell access
• He knows that it needs to be easy to learn
• He wants assurance that others have found it easy to use

We accomplished the above by recording the necessary scenes and playing them back at a higher speed (necessary because a lot of slower actions are performed), we also added 4 custom animations and used Andy for the professional voice-over.

The speed of the screencast is critical – given the mass of ISPs a person might survey when trying to find the right one for them we wanted to convey the entire message without having any of them get bored and click away.

If you want a screencast like the following for your site, do get in contact.

We’re rather proud of our latest screencam for Igor of MockupScreens.com.  Igor’s tool lets you quickly prototype a user-interface for desktop or web-based software.

“I needed a screencast for my product for quite some time, but actually doing it always got too complicated somehow. Then along came Ian and he helped me to get both the message right and the beautiful screencast online. I’m still fascinated by the ideas Ian and his team came up with to avoid any issues that arose during the making of the screencast.” – Igor Jese, CEO of MockupScreens

For this production we’ve taken a new approach:

• Richard and Ian tell the story of a Client and Consultant (this is our first 2-voice narration) working together on a new prototype
• We use a speeded-up section to build a part of the interface in just 15 seconds (this bit is very pretty!)

We’re very happy with the result – rather than just spelling out the features instead we take you on a relevant, context-laden tour of the package showing you all the tools that satisfy a prototyper’s needs.

The speeding-up with animated stop-watch is a nice mechanism to convey a time-consuming scene quickly, whilst still showing you that we start from the basics and build to the final product.

Kudos where it is due – our idea for the two narrators comes from Joel Spolsky’s wonderful FogBugz 6.0 tour where two of them lead us through a chatty tour of their bug-management tool.

Richard has a write-up too.

Crunch.co.uk offer a new type of on-line accounting solution for UK freelancers.  Their system combines both a book-keeping system and in-house accountants who manage and sign-off the yearly books.  Nobody else offers this service in the UK…and that’s a part of the problem.

Many freelancers didn’t ‘get’ the idea, Darren Fell (CEO) came to us to get a homepage screencast that would explain what they offer to first-time visitors.

We had a crazy-short delivery time to fit in with their launch requirements, we met the deadline and now our screencast helps explain to first-time visitors exactly what Crunch offers them and why they should sign-up.

“An outstanding service! Procasts did a staggering turnaround within 1 week. Now it’s live it’s made a startling difference to bringing customers on board.  If you don’t have a ProCast on the front of your website, get one now! In my view this is the only fast and coherent way to convey your product or service proposition in 3 minutes.” – Darren Fell, Managing Director Crunch.co.uk

Several prominent freelancers had explained privately that they hadn’t shouted about Crunch, even though it is local and sounded useful, because they hadn’t seen it in action.  Once our screencast was complete these same mavens were able to tell others to watch the video and see it in action, making the idea behind Crunch far more easy to transmit.

We chose to tell the story of how you, the Freelancer, would use Crunch to add an invoice, add an expense, bill the client, add the resulting payment and see your overall financial position.  The screencast also discusses how banks will be integrated into Crunch’s offering later so you need never login to your bank to see if a payment has arrived, and how they’ll automatically sign-off your accounts at the year-end.

The creation process included identifying the target users and their needs, building the right story and integrating key benefits into the script.  We used Jing with the client (thanks Michael!) to see how they used the application and from there we scripted the final narration and actions.  Richard worked on the animations and Andy White voiced the narration.