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:

Ian has just finished work on two new tutorial series for ShowMeDo which teach the viewer how to use OpenOffice Impress and OpenOffice Base.  The introduction videos are free and shown below, the rest of each series is only available inside ShowMeDo to paying Club members (or existing authors).

OpenOffice 3.1 Base

This series teaches the new user how to create a complete database with two tables, a relationship, forms, a query and it discusses deleting data.

1. Series Overview in 3 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 Base) (Free)
2. Make Database and Tables
3. Add Relationships & Data
4. Create a Patient Form
5. Adding Appointments (1/2)
6. Adding Appointments (2/2)
7. Deleting Data
8. Querying Data

OpenOffice 3.1 Impress

The Impress series teaches new users how to create their first Impress presentation, it works just like PowerPoint.  Ian shows them how to create three pages (Title, Bullet Points, Image with Text), use the built-in Layouts, add images, transitions and animations.

1. Series Overview in 2 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 Impress) (Free)
2. Making slides
3. Images & Transitions

These screencasts were recorded using BBFlashBack Pro on Windows XP using an sE2200A condenser mic.

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
• 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.

Bob Walsh of StartupToDo.com needed a way of explaining his innovative new site to entrepreneurs.  He turned to us (he’d interviewed me before for his show) and we created the following screencast for him.

Currently his site is in closed-beta, you’ll get a good idea of what’s on offer by watching the screencast.  The aim is to show the entrepreneur that his to-do lists will help them move their business forwards more quickly than if they had to do all the research themselves.

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