Archive for the ‘Client Work’ Category

a professional screencast for Tape Vault Expert

Monday, August 23rd, 2010
a professional screencast for Tape Vault Expert by Scraster Professional Screencasting

For years, people have been asking. They say, “Scraster, when are going to do a video for an online product that effectively eliminates the expenses associated with traditional off-site and on-site tape storage and tracking methods?” We were almost getting tired of hearing the question when we were approached by Rocket Software, the parent company of Servergraph and makers of a product called Tape Vault Expert. TVE does just this.

In all seriousness, when Rocket came to Scraster, we knew nothing about tape storage. We were familiar with the ubiquitous Iron Mountain trucks on the road, but that’s about it. One of the beauties of professional screencasting is learning about so many different areas of business… like tape management. In the course of a few conversations and the exchange of few emails with photo attachments, Scraster figured out the best way to approach the subject visually. Scraster’s lead animator Rory Campbell fired off some rough sketches to the client to make sure we were on the right track. A week or so later, we had transformed the client’s vision into an reality. The animation Rory creatively crafted would serve as the needed conceptual introduction to support the walkthrough of the Tape Vault Expert interface. The client will be the first to admit that the UI of the TVE interface is far from sexy, but in terms of function, TVE gets the job done better than anything on the market and this screencast effectively demonstrates exactly how for potential customers.

We’re happy to have learned something new and interesting about an industry we’d otherwise never come across and Rocket Software was/is very happy with their video. Scraster will likely be producing some videos for other Rocket/Servergraph products in the coming months. If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one Scraster Professional Screencasting produced for Tape Vault Expert, please be in touch. You can get the ball rolling with a free quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com or find us on Twitter.

A green professional screencast for Welectricity

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Scraster has always been proud of its minimalist carbon footprint. So when we went to work to create a professional screencast for a green website called Welectricity, we were glad to know we’d have a chance to write a blog post boasting about how darn green we are. [winky emoticon here]. In all seriousness, Scraster is happy and proud to introduce Welectricity, an online social network designed to promote energy efficiency in households. The slick web service helps users monitor and decrease their electricity consumption.

After a quick set-up at Welectricity, where the user tells the site a bit about their appliances and household, Welectricity takes a few numbers from your monthly electricity bill and crunches the numbers. The service presents a graphical representation of how you’re doing and offers instructive advice of how you can be doing better. An interesting social component comes into play when you meet other Welectricity users in your area or with similar households and see how your energy use stacks up. There’s twitter-style messaging built right in to create dialogue between you and the friends you either invite to the service or those whom you meet while you’re logged on. Welectricity will save you money–and will help you and your family create a greener house and world. Sign up for free today at Welectricity.com.

Thanks to Rory Campbell for adding some nice AfterEffects elements and effects to this project. Rory’s touch is carrying Scraster to the next level these days. If you like what you see here and think that your organization’s product or service can benefit from a professional screencast, why not get a free quote? You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for watching, commenting, and sharing!

Professional screencast for Teambox featured on TechCrunch

Monday, February 1st, 2010
Teambox screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

Teambox is an interesting new project management tool that bridges the gap between real-time social media like Twitter and web-based project management solutions like Basecamp. Pablo Villalba, the creator of Teambox, found Scraster online a few days after a major write-up on the popular blog ReadWriteWeb. Too bad that Scraster’s video couldn’t have been live before that major press, but not to worry–Teambox will be getting its share of press very soon. In fact, just this morning, Teambox was featured on TechCrunch.

Teambox’s objective in creating a screencast was to minimize bounces and grab visitor’s attention for a viewing experience that would lead to conversions. Teambox came to the right place, because site retention is what Scraster screencasts are all about.

We’re happy to be associated with Teambox, who we consider to be a client with enormous potential. We’re also very glad that Teambox was 100% psyched about their delivered video from the moment they saw it. Since the ESL office of Teambox is in Spain, Teambox relied heavily on Scraster’s expert script writing to guide the process. We gleaned a cursory understanding of the app during a Skype screenshared walkthrough by the client, and within a couple of days, we were engrossed in the elaborate script.

Teambox logoBecause of the collaborative nature of Teambox, the screencast script required not just a single user case, as is the norm, but a demonstrative scenario of an entire team of users. We decided that a small freelance web team would be a realistic way to communicate Teambox’s value and set a Project Manager named Frank at the video’s focal point. Frank and his team guide the user through a few multi-user scenarios to demonstrate Teambox’s major selling points. (One very fun part of creating a full-blown scenario like this? Hiding the Easter eggs.)

While the elaborate Teambox script and site set-up involved a lot of time and work, the effort wasn’t entirely on our end; the Teambox team made an invaluable contribution by being constantly on call to answer questions and to clear things out of the system when Scraster needed “a second take”. The results speak for themselves. Teambox was so pleased with their video that they blogged about their Scraster experience.

Like most of Scraster’s professional screencasts, the Teambox video was created in ScreenFlow with a handful of other tools. Thanks to Javier Saldeña, a Bay-Area based graphic artist, for his help bringing the Teambox logo to life in the AfterEffects bumpers.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one Scraster Professional Screencasting produced for Teambox, please be in touch. You can get the ball rolling with a free quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com or find us on Twitter.

We’d love to spread the word about Teambox, so please consider tweeting the following 128 characters:

Got 4:20? Check out the @scraster screencast for Teambox, a cool new Twitter-ish project management tool: http://bit.ly/9NuzYO

Thanks for reading. More soon.

professional iPhone app screencast for VoiceMark

Thursday, January 7th, 2010
    VoiceMark: a professional iPhone app screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

    Most of the inquiries coming to Scraster’s inbox these days are for iPhone and mobile screencasts. The demand for mobile app demonstrations is as limitless as that industry’s growth, so it’s a good time to be in Scraster’s position–we have the resources and the skill to be producing some of the best mobile app screencasts online. As our vids circulate and catch eyeballs, developers are lining up to get their own.

    Scraster’s latest iPhone app screencast was produced for VoiceMark, the flagship app of a sharp software firm called GeoGrafffiti. Voice Mark by GeoGraffiti is an iPhone app used to record voice messages about a specific locations. Voice Marks are geotagged to a point of interest and made available for the public to hear via any telephone. The script reads, “With an iPhone3G, it’s easy to Voice Mark the world and create audio geotags with your opinions and advice… or search and listen to Voice Marks already created in your specific area of interest”. You can download the app (it’s free!) at geograffiti.com.

    Scraster had fun producing this cool iphone screencast to introduce VoiceMark. We were given the liberty of adding some personal touches, like including the VoiceMark of a friend for the audio demonstration portion of the video. We also got to throw in a plug for Yoshi’s, our favorite Oakland jazz club, and use some of our other favorite spots around town for the VoiceMarks we created to demonstrate the app.

    One of the bigger challenges of producing professional screencasts is keeping the viewer visually engaged when there are lulls in screen action, for which we have a few strategies. The first is utilizing zooms, which give the video a sense of screen action where there is none. Highlighting screen areas also works in this way. Animation can sustain the video between sections of screen capture, but animation is very time consuming and is most often cost prohibitive for the client.

    Another effective method of spicing up video lulls in screencasts is to use the font of the client’s brand to create eye-popping text overlays to spice things up. The enhanced text seen in the VoiceMark video, which was all created in Photoshop using GeoGraffiti’s style guidelines, really pops and adds a lot to the video. The animated transitions of the text makes it all the more effective.

    VoiceMark CEO Chad Cook came to Scraster with a great looking app and brand identity, and Scraster took the ball and ran with it to create something that Chad hadn’t imagined. We were happy to receive the following testimonial from Chad:

    “The results Scraster delivered exceeded expectations with original ideas and solutions, all within budget and deadlines. They are experts in the field of screencast demonstration”

    If your organization has an iPhone app or an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one we created for VoiceMark, via email or on Twitter. Wanna share the VoiceMark video with your networks? Here’s some tweetage (92 characters) for your convenience:

    Here’s a nice looking iPhone app screencast demo produced by @scraster: http://bit.ly/8lqcSn

    Thanks for reading. More real soon!

a professional screencast website tour for WorldPoliticsReview.com

Monday, December 7th, 2009
World Politics Review screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

Scraster Professional Screencasting recently produced a screencast for World Politics Review, a premium provider of information and analysis on international affairs found online at worldpoliticsreview.com. The general manager at WPR approached Scraster with a familiar problem among paid-content websites: “We have all this great content behind our homepage, but we’re afraid people don’t know it’s there”. It was the objective of WPR to create a site tour that would show off the site, inside and out. WPR wrote most of the screencast script, and Scraster took control from there. The end result is an engaging screencast that servers two main purposes. First, the video is a introduction of WPR to new visitors who are unfamiliar with how to navigate the content-rich free side of the site. As well as giving unsubscribed visitors a cursory tour of the free content, the later part of the WPR screencast invites free users to consider the many benefits of WPR’s premium subscription service, which include a wealth of additional reports, downloads, and other exclusive content.

If you manage subscription-based website or have a premium online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like WPR’s, please visit Scraster’s Get a Free Quote page today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for sharing this World Politics Review video with others. Here is some short text that is handy for tweets:
>> Check out the new screencast from @scraster at http://scraster.com/wpr <<