We love to try all that’s new and useful in the world of presentations. We’re ‘early adopters’ here at The Message Business. We were one of the first to try, use and promote, Harvard Graphics in the late 80s, PowerPoint back in the 90’s, Keynote in the 00s and good old Prezi in the 2010s. Why do we early adopt? Because we want an edge in our own business.
We want every advantage we can get when we’re selling our products and services all around the world. It’s one of the reasons we’re so well know for such a bijou bunch of Brits. We use everything we can to be seen and heard. There’s another reason why we like to be up to date, and that’s because as you might know, lots of our business is about helping people sell their ideas, products and services as widely as possible so our clients appreciate us staying bang up to date too.
We want you to have the same advantages as the best equipped sales team, every time you stand up to speak and sell.
For the last year or so we’ve been using VideoScribe by Sparkol. It’s a neat and great-value tool to help you add a little bit of hand-drawn animation magic to your presentations, your web-hosted videos and and your twitter feed. The trend for ‘hand drawn’ started when Sir Ken Robinson and the RSA in England, did this…
And it was Sparkol, the creators of VideoScribe, that helped RSA and Sir Ken to do it and create the global trend. So if you want some of that kind of engaging content in the stuff that you do, Adding VideoScribe to your toolkit is a very cost-effective way of getting that extra capability.
You create simple (and complex if you want) videos using your own vector images to add any diagram, shape, cartoon image or graphic to the working canvas. If you don’t have any vector graphics you can buy them and use them in the software or use Sparkol’s vast selection of library symbols, figures and cartoons. You can add text, timings, fade in and animation effects to your storyboard, and then even even music and a narration if you want to. Then you can export the videos to a wide range of video formats, to use as you wish with no restrictions (once you’ve paid for the service).
It’s been great tool for us, and we’ve created and sold about 30 videos in the past 6 months for our clients to use as a part of their presentations, pitches, and communications. That thousands of dollars of revenue has paid us back 20 times over, and more, for the c. $500 investment we made in 2014 for a lifetime subscription. That’s one of the many reasons that we love the tool.
Here’s an example of one of our earliest bits of work, where we took some of our own existing vector files from Adobe Illustrator, converted them to the .SVG vector file format and simply uploaded them to the desktop of the VideoScribe app. Once uploaded, the software recognises the lines that make up the drawing, and the order in which they were created in the vector file, drwas those same lines in that same order on to the canvas. The programme even gives you options to have one of their diverse range of left and right hands (or even your own) draw those images line by line and shade by shade. It’s a really clever, simple tool with great support materials and advice.
So what’s the catch? There aren’t any really, so why not give it a go? Take their 7-day free trial and see what it will do for you.
If you follow this link then we’ll get paid a few pennies if you go on to subscribe, but that’s not why we’re writing this post. We’re writing it because we think you need a bit of this in your life right now. There’s also a brilliant Blog to follow and great presentation tips and resources to download for Free in eBook form. All in all I’m a big fan of Sparkol and of VideoScribe as a product.
