At our last boot camp session, I had students who got to talking about “set it and forget it” tools for presenting sexy slideshow material. The topic of Animoto and its various clones inevitably came up. These sites promise easy video results, and on the surface, they provide just that.
I even read a forum post about a year ago by a fellow screencaster who was concerned about this, wondering how professional screencasters are supposed to compete with a-few-clicks-and-done.
I don’t blame a beginning screencaster only just embarking on his career to be concerned about being replaced by a robot, but I do get exasperated at clients who fall into this trap.
They see Animoto vids, and they hear the pulse-pounding techno soundtrack, and take in the sexy, rapidfire, almost seizure-inducing visuals. Then they contact me saying “Oooh! We want that!”
Well, no you don’t. Dummy.
Another screencaster acquaintance of mine, Lon Naylor, has this motto that he puts on his site that’s a take-off on the old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” ad campaign, but he says “Friends don’t let friends make crappy videos.” Which is engaging and cute, but I think most clients (and even most providers) fall short of really considering what truly makes for a crappy video.
When you ask most people, they immediately zero in on the technical. Bad audio, fuzzy visuals, no niceties like callouts and zooms and captioning. And all those things are certainly considerations, but they don’t make or break a screencast.
My definition of a crappy screencast is a lot simpler. It’s a video that does not do the job you commissioned it to do. Training videos that are not pedagogically sound, that do not adhere to a set of basic established principles of educational multimedia, and how people best learn with multimedia. Marketing videos without a rock-solid unique selling proposition. That are essentially a dry list of features rather than a solid hook at the beginning, followed by a series of tangible, real world benefits. Knocking out the common objections and guiding the viewer ever so gently toward the sale, culminating in a call-to-action, a dynamite offer that leaves ’em smacking their forheads and reaching for their wallets.
Animoto and their ilk can’t give you this. Neither can a human screencaster who only brings to the table a rudimentary technical knowledge of making screencasts.
Makers of screencasting software, like TechSmith and Telestream, sell people this notion that anybody can make a screencast, and from a technical perspective, that’s true. But unless you have didactic or persuasive abilities to go along with that, you’ll be relegated to making ineffective screencasts, and they won’t get any better at their jobs regardless of how much you pretty them up.
When people ask what I do for a living, I always say “professional screencaster,” and then prepare for the inevitable confused looks. But I’m realizing that it’s not entirely accurate, that maybe I’ve positioning myself wrong all this time. That I’m not a “screencaster” with a capital S. I’m a trainer. I’m a copywriter and a marketer. And I happen to “work in” screencasting the way a painter works in oils or watercolor.
There are going to be those clients who already have those elements figured out (or at least think they do), but even if you really do know what you’re doing, it’s always beneficial to get an outside set of eyes on it. Sometimes you’re too close to a project and its product to see the forest for the trees. These folks will potentially get turned off by this value-add, and the corresponding bump in price that comes with it. But that’s fine. Because those projects where I’m expected to be a “multimedia monkey” whose exclusive focus is on the technology aren’t interesting to me, anyway. I like to get my hands dirty with higher-level thinking.
So you get good at this other stuff, and establish a core baseline of competence. The next level, which I’m only just getting into, is where things get really exciting.
And it’s an exciting time to be in screencasting. The future of the screencasting industry in my opinion lies in the quantative, lies in measuring your success. Now web metrics is a discipline that has been around for years, and it’s now just starting to come into its own on the video side. And it’s actually even more interesting (read: useful) than general web metrics. For example, with a piece of web copy, you don’t really have a way to knowing what the user was reading when they bought, or when they bailed. But because video is comparatively much more linear, it’s easy to know, down to the second, the exact moment when the user got turned on (or off). That’s incredibly powerful information.
Something I’ve been playing around with is this notion of “iterative screencasting,” where you’re making incremental improvements to a screencast, and even split testing its effectiveness against earlier videos. Now, this is obviously more feasible for marketing videos than for training. But it’s often amazing how little changes can make a big difference, not just for the screencast in itself, but as a part in your overall sales funnel.
Do YOU measure your results? Sound off here, and let us know what software and systems you use.
