Scraster Professional Screencasting: Professional Screencast Production » screencast

A green professional screencast for Welectricity

Scraster — Sun, 09 May 2010 21:41:05 +0000

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

Scraster — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:02:39 +0000

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.

Because 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

Scraster — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:27:26 +0000

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 BlackBerry screencast for 5Touch

Scraster — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:29:31 +0000

image from http://www.aiga.org

It’s rumored that at Scraster, we only wear black turtlenecks and jeans. That’s just not true. While we adhere to the Steve Jobs dresscode most of the time, Fridays are casual, when Scraster employees are free to wear any color tutrleneck they choose. Likewise, it’s important to make clear that we aren’t all Mac screencasting at Scraster. We produce the same great looking videos we do for Mac and iPhone apps for Windows-based applications. We’re proud to now offer BlackBerry app screencasts as well as screencasts to demonstrate mobile apps on the Android platform.

Our most recent client was a San Jose/Toronto-based mobile software firm called 5Touch, whose new 5TEG mobile platform enables conference and event attendees to access live information such as agenda, map, exhibitor and speaker profiles on their smartphones and use social media channels to share and connect with others. 5Touch tapped Scraster to create a vid that introduced the 5TEG platform using sharp imagery and titling and interactive screen capture from the BlackBerry Storm. Scraster used the finger cursor to create a short, realistic demonstration of how easy and effective the app could be for event attendees. The screencast also illustrates the value of the 5TEG mobile platform to event sponsors, who are part of the target audience as well.

Bob Vaez, CEO of 5Touch, provided Scraster with this glowing testimonial upon the project’s completion:

“Scraster literary saved us 3-4 days of work trying to create a marketing/screencast for our mobile platform. Scraster… was extremely professional, cared about the quality of the work and was responding to our requests around the clock. The process was very well organized, and the result was way beyond our expectation as Scraster was able to tap into its marketing/artistic creativity and go beyond our basic requirement for an online marketing video. I highly recommend Scraster to anyone thinking about doing a screencast to showcase their software, mobile app or website online”.

Thanks, Bob! The pleasure was ours!

If your organization has a mobile product–Blackberry, iPhone, or Android– that you would like to demonstrate through the effective medium of professional screencasting, no one does it better than Scraster. Get a free quote from our website. Also, feel free to contact us with any questions you have about creating your own mobile screencasts. We’ve got all the kinks ironed out here and would be happy to share what we know. You can email us at info@scraster.com or find us at Twitter, where we’re @scraster.

If you’d like to let your friends or colleagues know where they can have professional BlackBerry screencasts produced, please share the following text via a tweet or a status update:

Looking to do a BlackBerry screencast? @scraster does iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and regular web scrasts: http://bit.ly/5eMMmr

Going to Dreamforce 2009? Are you packing a professional screencast?

John — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:37:49 +0000

Dreamforce 2009, the Cloud Computing Event of the Year, is taking place November 17 throught the 20th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you’re attending, you know what an important opportunity this is. If you’re a vendor, it’s even more important.

At salesforce.com’s seventh annual user and developer conference, 12,000 customers, partners, and employees will be in attendence for four days with a similar goal in mind: maximizing an investment in salesforce.com and learning from the best how to use the cloud to stay ahead of the competition.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produces high-quality screencast video tutorials and software demos and has experience producing videos specifically for salesforce.com AppExchange applications. Our screencast videos, which can live on the client’s own homepage or as an embed on the AppExchange page, are the most effective way to show off the capabilities and value of a software. A Scraster video is also ideal for presentation scenarios, such as meetings or loop-play from a conference booth. Like Dreamforce 2009!

If you’re a vendor who has something to share with the Dreamforce community and you don’t have a screencast to demonstrate your product or service, you have a problem. Fortunately, Scraster Professional Screencasting has the solution. There’s not a lot of time left, so contact us today to learn how the highly-effective medium of screencast video can capture customers’ attention in what is sure to be a fight for eyeballs at Dreamforce 2009.