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.

ApexAuctions now have a set of four support videos which teach new users how to perform common tasks when they’re bidding for used machinery and industrial equipment :

1. Creating an account
2. Registering for an auction
3. How to change your password
4. How to bid

The videos are there to help more users help themselves.  Currently some new users get frustrated and have to phone the tech-support line at ApexAuctions at the end of each auction.  The videos address the most common questions that are asked and they will be embedded at the most sensible places in the site.

Adam has blogged about the videos on their blog.

Creating an account:

Registering for an auction:

Changing your password:

Bidding:

Recently we delivered four demo videos to Macmillan Publishing that explain their new mindOnline language-learning product to teachers and students.

We worked directly with their product lead and script writer to create four screencasts from 2 minutes to 5 minutes that show various aspects of their product.  The videos are now hosted on their main landing page and component list page.  Here’s an example:

The process included prototyping the initial screencasts, iterating with the scripter and working with a new American narrator.  Much of the material was static so we developed ways of calling out and zooming in to the material to focus on the key visuals.

The four videos are also available in our YouTube account:

• mindOnline demo video (deleted at client’s request as it is now out of date)
• openMind Students Book demo video
• openMind Teachers Edition demo video
• openMind Workbook demo video

If you are interested in having demo videos like these for your product 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.

Armel at Ellié Computing wanted a short tour screencam to to demonstrate all the features of their ECMerge diff tool.  Diff tools help programmers, graphic artists and office workers compare different versions of files.  Programmers use them to compare source-code files, graphic artists can compare images and office workers can compare Word files.

We worked with Armel to identify the key features of ECMerge and the needs of his users, then we created a script.  Armel also created a demo screencast for us using Jing to show the main features in action, this helped us to understand his application faster so we could create the script sooner.

By watching the tour you’ll see how their Diff tool works.  If you’ve seen a programmer’s diff tool before, you may be surprised to see ECMerge highlight the differences between images and Word, OpenOffice and RTF documents (I used to be a programmer so I knew of the tool but seeing images diff’d – that was cool).

Richard has also written this up.

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.

I’ve just finished production of a new 12-part tutorial  series for ShowMeDo, the result is OpenOffice Calc 3.1 for Microsoft Excel users.  The overview is embedded below, links to all the episodes are further down.

Note that this series is a part of ShowMeDo’s Club so you need to be a paying member or contributing author to get access to all the episodes.  The series was produced on Windows using CamTasia 6.

1. Series Overview in 3 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 for Excel users) (Free)
   
2. Installing OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows XP (Free)
3. Working with .xls Sheets in Calc
4. Saving as an ODF Spreadsheet (.ods) and PDF
5. Where to get help
6. Constructing a Sales-Forecast Sheet
7. Formatting your Sheet
8. Creating a Chart
9. Printing your Sheet
10. Import and Export CSV files
11. Re-associating .xls files with Excel after OpenOffice installation
12. Light relief – Star Wars Easter Egg and others

Update – we just won an award for this screencast from TechSmith, woot!

We’ve just finished working on the following screencast for Andy (CEO) at Orchestrate to demonstrate their workforce scheduling software.  This screencast replaces Andy’s earlier screencast that we’d critiqued, the new version appears on their Tour page.

“Working with Ian was a pleasure from beginning to end. He has a fantastic understanding of the steps involved in shooting a compelling screencast, combined with the ability to communicate with our target audience.

His approach was methodical and focused reflecting his extensive experience in this field.

I was very impressed with the new video, and we have received many compliments on how well it demonstrates the features of Orchestrate” – Andy Wright (CEO)

Our solution shows you ‘a day in the life of Orchestrate’, it shows you how easy it is to schedule jobs and see that they’re completed.

The goals are to show Operation’s Managers:

• It is very easy to learn
• Everything runs in the web-browser with no additional software
• Scheduling and rescheduling are easy
• There are no start-up fees or lock-ins
• Operatives provide a write-up after the job for Compliance
• Clients can see the status of all their jobs

The ultimate goal is to convince more visitors to the website to try Orchestrate, improving their conversion rate so they acquire new paying users without having to spend more on advertising.

Given the number of software solutions available to Operation’s Managers it was necessary for us to design the right screencast to convince them that this tool is the one they need.  Our process involved:

• Profiling the intended viewers
• Analysing the needs of these viewers
• Dropping Andy’s approach of the Feature Tour
• Adopting the idea of a story
• Story-boarding to create the right story
• Creating a script that fulfills the story’s objectives
• Recording a prototype for critique
• Creating a finished screencast
• Providing YouTube, .flv and .mp4 versions

Now we are monitoring the results to see what kind of improvement the new screencast brings to Andy’s sign-up rate.  Details on this will follow.  Richard has blogged an entry from his point of view as the animator and co-creative and client-Andy has blogged a superb entry:

“I didn’t understand how to tell an engaging story about labour scheduling software, but the team at ProCasts did.”

If you want to more effectively convert your visitors into signed-up paying users, get in Contact to talk about our Examples and how we can help you.

I’ve just finished producing a series for ShowMeDo (I co-founded ShowMeDo in 2005) for OpenOffice Writer users.  In OpenOffice 3.1 Writer for Microsoft Word users I spend 45 minutes covering 11 topics for the new Writer user aimed at easing their transition across from MS Office:

1. Series Overview in 4 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 for Word users)
2. Installing OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows XP
3. Working with Word (.doc) files
4. Working with an OpenDocument Format (.odt) file
5. Help! Manuals, Forums and Mail lists
6. Basic Formatting (bold, italic etc)
7. Exporting to PDF, HTML, MediaWiki
8. Printing
9. Word-completion
10. Find and Replace, Undo
11. Spell Checker

I’ve authored over 130 tutorial videos at ShowMeDo (see Ian’s author page) and the majority of the videos in the Club (which generates ShowMeDo’s income) were researched, scripted and recorded by me.

If you want to learn Python or OpenOffice then do take a look at ShowMeDo, there are over 1,000 tutorial videos (the majority are free, produced by our community) covering all sorts of open-source topics.