New Grumo Student Demo Video: GR Sites

Gabriel Ross has produced a cute animated demo video for his startup GR Sites after taking our Grumo Course. Here it is:

I really like Gabriel’s voice and I think a great job on his first demo video so I asked him some questions about his process:

How long did it take to put together?

About a month of hard labor. I can see how it would be worthwhile to pay Grumo Media $5000-$15000 to make such a video, but at least this way I can iterate rapidly to improve conversion rate. Adding the video to the home page at http://www.grsites.com/ has already increased it 40%, so I am quite pleased with my meager first attempt!

How did you record the voice over?

Using Audacity with a headset under a heavy children’s blanket. The kids were really puzzled as what that was doing in daddy’s office! 🙂 I split the script into 20 units or so and recorded each one over a dozen times. Each unit was designed to stand by itself so it can be moved around to sync with the animation.

What was the hardest part?

Doing the animation in Adobe After Effects. The software is really complex, but powerful. There is quite a learning curve there. Also, I found it really hard to design the character assets in Illustrator in such a way that they strike a balance between looking simple and friendly (cartoonish), versus more professional-looking. I’m still not quite happy with them. Especially since GRSites is a web design service: it enables you to create design elements that you place in your web pages to shnazz them up. The video uses a number of such GRSites-generate design elements as examples that fly around, but it was terribly hard to do them justice and make them look good at the smaller resolution of a demo video. I’m sure I will have to completely redo those Illustrator assets soon.

What was the simplest part?

Doing the sound effects. I got a bunch of them from GRSites.com itself since it features a sound effect archive, among other things. I also used AudioMicro (recommended in the course) which had a lot of useful things. The effects had to be edited, tempos changed, noise removed. I recorded a number of effects myself, like the whooshes, clickety-clicks, oohs and ahhs, etc… The giggle sound effect at the end of the video was recorded by my 5-year-old son Alex. He and his brother wanted to be daddy’s “big helpers”.

Where did you find the music?

From my own CD collection. 😉 As I see it, if I had used some pop tune without authorization, the copyright owner would have been obvious. But Bach’s Prelude No.1 from the “Well-tempered Klavier” has been recorded numerous times, no one will know which recording this is. If I get a complaint, I’ll change it. Sneaky, I know. The music had to be cut and pasted a bit so that its highs and lows match with the flow of the voice-over. I may change the music anyway to something more generic, as Miguel recommended.

How did you find about the Grumo course?

I saw Miguel’s Mixergy interview, and was instantly sold on the value of a good demo video. I hope the one I did is OK, but I will definitely improve it gradually. Any constructive feedback is always welcome!

How did the Grumo Course help you?

The most useful help I received from the Grumo course was:
– How to design a good script (statement of problem, solution, explanation… in the right proportions) with the 7 SUCCESS rules in mind. Really good stuff, and simple to apply. I was most impressed by the need to generate warm, fuzzy feelings and make people laugh. This is key.
As a side note, Miguel’s spreadsheet technique for the SUCCESS rules inspired me to create a care schedule for my wife. As a geek who rarely sees the need to NOT be in front of a computer, it’s easy to neglect one’s wife. Her reminders of this fact are vivid and frequent. So I made a spreadsheet, one row per day, and columns like “conversation”, “flirting”, “cuddles”, “compliments”. To early to tell whether it helps, I didn’t AB test it or anything. 😉
– Character rigging with Illustrator which I was only vaguely familliar with before.
– The After Effects tutorial was invaluable, I had no clue how to do this kind of animation before, that section of the course had many small tips to get started right away, rather than going through thick books about the software. The high-def videos for the rigging and animationwere a good idea because viewed fullscreen, it looks almost like a live screen of the application. I ended up using Adobe Premiere for putting together the footage, rather than Final Cut Pro. I was using Windows 7 for this.

Thanks a lot Gabriel for taking the time to answer my questions.

If you want to learn how to produce your own animated demo video simply take our 9 chapter Grumo Course HERE.