Mason's Island Yacht Club was undergoing a complete overhaul of their website.  Some club members and stakeholders were struggling to jump on board with change. The rollout of the website had recently been delayed which turned some skeptics into critics.  The yacht club reached out to me to create a video to explain the new features and demonstrate the positive changes to be expected upon the official launch of the new site.  We agreed that a screencast of the site was the best way to demonstrate the upcoming features, so I was given a test login, discussed the most important features that needed to be highlighted, then got to work making the video.

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I didn’t want to read a script word for word while filming, so the script I wrote was much more of an outline, highlighting the most important points that needed to be made. With an open communication line, I worked with the yacht club’s web team to tweak several drafts before the final version was approved.

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I opted to use Camtasia on this project for its ability to easily handle screencasts such as this one.

The editing was extremely rudimentary.  I wanted to have a video of me while working through the website, but I did not have the ability to be onsite. Because I value connecting with the audience, I requested several still images of the club to use as a background.  I filmed video and audio from a webcam instead of my professional microphone and intentionally left the audio untouched to make it seem more realistic that I was actually on location filming from an outdoor setup. Connecting with the audience trumped having professional level video and audio. Camtasia’s video editing functionality was not pushed to any limits during this project: it was a simple green screen background plus some basic positioning and resizing of the video overlay.

Unlike an eLearning course, rolling out a sneak peek of a website has no numerical data to analyze.  That being said, follow-up conversations confirmed that the video was very well received and while there are always going to be those resistant to change, I was told that the video did a tremendous job in silencing much of the impatience and criticism that the web team was feeling and instilled renewed excitement in those members who were already eager for the new website.