Video

Creating an advertisement and introduction to new users in one video

Task: We needed an explainer-type video to serve in both a sales and a client success capacity—the sales team needed a video that showed potential clients what our platform could do and what it looked like inside, and our client success team needed a video that helped new members (employees whose employer had just purchased our services as a benefit) understand what they now had access to and how to use our platform features.

Solution: I worked with our client success and sales teams to write the storyboard for this video. Then, I created the video and voiceover in Camtasia. After several rounds of editing and revisions, we released the video to all of our clients, which was many hundreds of thousands of users. Our sales team continues to use this video as a long-form explainer video for any prospective clients who ask to see more detail about our platform.

Designing a video for a marketing campaign

Task: Our company wanted to deploy a marketing campaign incentivizing childcare providers, like nannies, to join our network of providers. Our network model lets us pre-vet and screen providers so that families can access emergency childcare faster when the need arises.

Solution: One challenge of this request was that our team asked me for a 24-hour turnaround for this video. As the creator, that’s never ideal, but I was able to drop everything else and make this happen, and the campaign went out on time the following day as planned. I asked for a quick turnaround of edits from our marketing team, and they had a few requests for some specific stock imagery they wanted, and after a few changes, it was good to go.

Creating an external advertisement for a new product feature

Task: Although Learning Designers typically focus on internal audiences, I was approached by Welthy’s Marketing team with a request for an externally-facing video. The goal was to promote a new product feature: Wellthy Community.

Solution: I wrote the storyboard for this video and sent it to the team for approval first, then created this video from scratch using Premiere Pro and elements I designed in Illustrator. As an added challenge, I taught myself some basic features of After Effects to design the quick desk animation at the very end of the video.

Generating excitement for LinkedIn Learning

Task: Our team was onboarding LinkedIn Learning, a professional development video learning platform, and I wanted to build excitement among our employees. I wanted to create a video that was more evergreen—and therefore reusable—than “LinkedIn Learning is coming,” or “LinkedIn Learning has dropped,” but I wanted the video to have a clear emotional pull.

Solution: I created the one-minute video below that tells a story of someone weighed down by work, family matters, COVID school closures, and home improvement issues; this fictional person might benefit from the time, space, and resources our company was about to provide in the form of a LinkedIn Learning membership.

Process: I storyboarded the video first to get the green-light from my senior leadership, then built each shot using a combination of Photoshop and screen captures. I edited the video in Premiere Pro.

Using Vyond to introduce a training topic

Problem: We needed to train our customer service representatives on a new way of storing and sharing data. To many employees, this would come as a big and stressful change. I wanted to introduce the training in a fun way by explaining the WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and level-setting about the importance of this change.

Solution: I wrote a storyboard (script and visuals) and presented it to our customer service leaders before making the video, then animated the below video in Vyond. I recorded and edited the voiceover in Audition, then combined the video and audio.

Outcome: This introduction to the change teed employees up to take the training (also a video) and helped them understand the importance of the change. By the time they took the training, they were bought-into the process and had very little pushback when we changed processes.

Using video to change learner behavior

Problem: Our team noticed that a high percentage of employee issues were solved by suggesting they use a browser other than the default Internet Explorer (IE).

Solution: We communicated the browser solution in various ways: adding a note to the first page of our eLearning courses, adding language about browser choice to the course assignment email, and adding a reminder to our learning homepage. Despite these additions, we still received IE-related questions. I suggested we create a funny video and leverage our a popular internal video network, Allego, to spread the word.

Process: I decided to repurpose the popular browser meme below into a Tik-Tok style video that we could share. I asked a few colleagues to participate, wrote a script, and storyboarded the video. We filmed one person a time—changing the background color in between—so nailing the timing was essential.

Editing: I edited and color graded in Premiere Pro.

Result: We shared the final video below on our training channel. Employees thought it was funny and had positive reactions to it, and questions from employees using Internet Explorer decreased by 50%.

Screencasts with Voiceover

I regularly record screencasts with voiceover for training purposes. Here’s a sample of “Mac Tips” I recorded for my colleagues, many of whom are new(er) to using Mac products in the workplace. Some topics were reactive (e.g., I noticed a colleague didn’t know how to take a screenshot) and some were proactive (I create videos I hope will be helpful, although I haven’t seen anyone struggling with the topic yet). For the series below, I used Camtasia to record and edit.

Watch the videos on Vimeo.

Senior leaders speak about a revamped recognition program

This video highlighted a new employee recognition program. Two senior leaders spoke about why recognizing our colleagues is important. What was most challenging about this video was the amount of footage I had to cull through to piece together clips that made sense alongside one another. One leader was very comfortable in front of the camera and one was not at all, so the challenge with one set of footage was trimming an hour of excellent material, and the challenge with the other set was trying to pull out enough footage that told a cohesive story while still trying to make the leader look comfortable and professional in the video. The next step was weaving the two sets of clips together into a short video that made sense and communicated the message clearly. This video was challenging, but ultimately went out to many thousands of employees and set up our recognition program for a successful launch.

Multitasking Activity

This short video was part of a course about multitasking (or, more accurately, task-switching), where we asked learners to take out a paper and a pencil for a short activity.

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