As you’ve probably noticed, overview videos that explain “how it works” are everywhere these days, and are especially effective in describing new products to people that have never heard of them before. We knew it was important to create an explainer video for our home page, but we didn’t want to spend a ton of money hiring someone else to do it. We love learning new things and we thought it would be really cool to ‘eat our own dogfood’. These are the steps we took to make our own explainer video:
Step 1: Write a script for the story you want to tell
First, we brainstormed a bunch of different use cases for Authntk, including agencies, companies, and brands. Separately, we listed out the problems Authntk solves, from easy video collection for businesses, to simple video moderation, to social video sharing, and so on. Then we chose one of the use cases with a few associated pain points, and made up a story to go along with it.
We created two fictional characters (Alice and Dave), and told of their struggles with video.
Step 2: Create storyboards for each scene in the story
Once we had the story we wanted, we drew some (very) rough sketches on a whiteboard of each scene to go along with each point we wanted to emphasize in the story. We transferred the whiteboard sketches to a PowerPoint deck, and along the way refined the scenes to go along with the story, and refined the script to go along with the scenes.
Step 3: Find someone who can draw
When we took turns drawing crude stick figures on our whiteboard it quickly became evident that while we’ve got a talented team at Authntk, none of us can draw to save our lives! So we all reached out to our social networks to the artists that we know, and within an hour, we had found Mike Ricigliano, a national sports cartoonist who was interested in learning more about the assignment.
Len sent Mike our PowerPoint slides, and after Mike saw how hopeless we were (he must have felt sorry for us), he agreed to come into our office one afternoon to help us out. We talked through each of our crude sketches and discussed the main elements we wanted to convey. He drew a few different styles of characters for us to choose from, and then we left him alone in our conference room to sketch. A few hours later he came out with about 20 awesome drawings!
Step 4: Scan and cleanup the artwork as needed
After the drawings were done, we ran them through our scanner so we’d have electronic copies to work with. Once all the images were scanned, we cleaned up some of the pencil marks, cropped out the extra white space, erased some of the backgrounds, and re-sized a few of the drawings so they’d all be in proper scale to one another.
Step 5: Manipulate the images to create each scene
While Mike drew all of the core elements we needed in a few hours, it would have taken days to draw every single frame for our video. Instead, we imported the scanned pictures into image editing software, and put each drawing on it’s own layer. We duplicated many of the drawings and parts of drawings onto multiple layers so they could be modified or moved to create the “animation”.
After all of the duplications and modifications were made, we were left with an image file with 150 or so separate layers. We began with the layers that we wanted visible in the first scene and hid all the other layers. Then we saved off a separate image file for just that scene, hid and un-hid layers to move the characters and elements a little bit, saved off another image file, and kept repeating that process until all the scenes and all the movements were done. When we were done saving off images, we had over 100 individual files.
Step 6: Record a voice-over
Since we had the script written from the beginning, recording the voice-over was easy. Our smooth talking CEO whipped out his trusty iPhone, launched the memo app and nailed it in a few takes.
Step 7: Find background music
We tried to get Ayo to crank out a quick tune for our background music, but he’s been so busy coding that he’s out of practice on his guitar (or so he claims). Instead, we looked online for free (or cheap) music to use. Creative Commons has a pretty good list of sites that have legal music for videos, and the Vimeo Music Store has a nice selection of music as well.
We narrowed it down to a few choices we liked, and finally settled on “Fastest Man on Earth” by Jahzzar (betterwithmusic.com).
Step 8: Import the assets into your video editing software
Once we had all the content for our video, it was time to merge everything together. Fortunately, we had the foresight to name each image file sequentially, so when we imported them into our video editing software, they were automatically sorted in the order we wanted them. We also imported the voiceover audio file and the background music file.
Step 9: Sync up the audio and images
When we imported the images into our video editing software, the default time (or number of frames) each image was shown was exactly the same. We adjusted the time for each image to make the animation (somewhat) smooth, and to coordinate the images with the voiceover story. Some images are only shown for milliseconds, while others are shown for several seconds.
We also trimmed and split the voiceover track in a few places to to add or remove pauses as necessary, and played with the volume levels to make sure the background music didn’t drown out the voiceover.
Step 10: Create the movie
Once all of the hard work was over, it was just a matter of letting the video editing software do it’s thing to process and convert the video into a playable format (we used an .mp4). About twenty minutes later, the movie file finished and was ready to watch! We made a few revisions to tweak the language we used in the voiceover, the voiceover-to-image timing, and the sound levels.