So before we dive in, a confession…as members of our Funding Academy Facebook group have reminded me on a few occasions, I suck at creating videos.
And No, this is not a tired attempt to sell you a video creation course or anything at all…but rather to take you through what’s been happening on the ‘inside’ of the Funding Guru team.
Last year I launched Funding Academy and spent probably a week to create three videos for that launch.
- Step 1 was creating three keynote presentations. I use Keynote as I use a mac for most of the creative stuff. If you have a PC then you’ll probably use powerpoint.
- Step 2 was creating an audio script for it, which was then overlaid as text on the slides to be prompts for the voiceover.
- Step 3 was to go through the presentations and record myself speaking the presentation.
- Step 4 – last step – was to add the audio track.
Couple of points to mention…
1) Added transitions – transitions are the motions as visual objects enter and exit the screen – they ‘reset’ the concentration of the watcher and stops them from getting bored (so powerpoint and keynote junkies say…)
2) Audio – made sure the audio was royalty free and I owned the rights to the songs – the last thing we need is someone getting legally grumpy for us using their songs without permission.
Great. Done. But although I’m happy with the 3 videos created (You can go to YouTube and type ‘TheFundingGuru’ to watch these videos…) and although at the time people told me they liked them..and lets not forget Funding Academy sold out within 72 hours (so job done from a results perspective…) – well despite those points, a lot has changed in a year.
After the frank, blunt, some might say brutal feedback I received from the Funding Academy members group on last years videos – I went on a hunt for better ways to create engaging videos.
And I think I found some…
The first is called PowToon – its an online platform that you can use to create some really cool videos…
Here’s an example using PowToon:
That video took around 2 hours to make including voiceover and audio and that 2 hours includes getting up to speed on how to use the PowToon platform…next time it would probably take an hour.
It could be better but its not so bad…(Comments welcome)
A few other benefits of PowToon – the projects you create can be clone, so you can take a finished PowToon, duplicate it, tweak the duplication and have a new video with a new message pretty fast.
So that’s PowToon – it should help the Funding Guru team create so pretty kick ass videos.
So why did we check out PowToon?
Well because the App Sumo guys had a deal on it.
If you are on the hunt for platforms to make great video quickly, check out PowToon. You might also want to take a look at their main competitor, a platform called Sparkol.
Both Sparkol and PowToon have a free, limited membership so you can check it out.
So – in the quest to engage more potential clients and customers, we went out and found a couple of good resources for you to check out.
If you do – drop back and tell us what you think of them.
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