We had talked about why we decided to create video to present GrexIt to visitors to our site in this post we had done some time back. We have, since, been asked a lot how we created this video, being programmers, and not artists or animators. So here's the story.

We started with looking at our options. If you have a product that you want to present with a video, we think you have the following options:

1. A product screen-cast with a voice-over, like this. This is usually easy to create with a screen-capture tool like Camtasia, which can also help you edit the video, add effects and combine a voice-over. You can also do the voice-over yourself, with a good quality microphone in a very quiet room. And if you want someone to do it all for you, talk to Demogirl. These ladies do a real neat job on this.

Why we did not do this for grexit: This is usually a good way to show a product's features to users. But with GrexIt, we had to do more. We had to first state the user's problem, present the basic idea about grexit and then show how grexit effectively solves the problem for the user. Really, we needed more than a product screen-cast.

2. An animated video with human-like characters, like this: It's a video with animated human characters, with the characters talking and using gestures. This is a great idea if you want to present a story or concept through conversations between two or more characters. There are many tools online which can help you create and just such a video. Try GoAnimate and Xtranormal .

Why we did not do this for GrexIt: We could not really explain our story without a third person account being presented by a voice-over. Just the characters talking was not enough for us. Also, we wanted something very minimal.

3. A video that combines pictures/animations, a voice-over and product screen-shots, like the one on Dropbox. This can do a great job explaining hard ideas using pictures, simple animations and a voice.talking in the background. It is hard to create, but good at explaining hard concepts. We figured this is what we needed for GrexIt. And we started our efforts on figuring out how we can get one. Turns out there are agencies like Switch Marketing which can build such a video for you. The problem - they are astronomically expensive for a bootstrapped startup like ours. So, we figured if we wanted a great video, it was time to take matters into our hands.

In my previous life, I (Niraj) have been interested in sketching. I tried some doodling, and saw I could still draw pictures with some effort. I needed to use the eraser more than the pencil, but with some hard work, I could still make simple pictures. And Nitesh, in his previous life, knew some action-script.  He was never an animator - he did not know how to work on an animation time-line like flash animators would. But he could write code to move things on the screen.

And so we had the basic ingredients.

We first started with writing a script for the voice-over. We would write a script, quickly record it on the computer, and evaluate it for 'impact' and duration. We observed other videos to understand what is the right speed to narrate at. And we finalized the script when we brought down the duration to little over two minutes, and the impact to maximum.

After finalizing the voice-over script, we needed someone to record it - Santosh, a tech enthusiast from Bangalore, did it free of cost for us! Then, we worked on a screen-by-screen description of the video we wanted to build. Excerpts:

--
scene 3:
audio: He gets no information, and it turns out to be a pretty frustrating experience for him.scene: Ray throwing up his hands, frustrated.

scene 4:
audio: Ray has absolutely no idea that 10 months back, Simon and Ahhi, who also worked at WeCanSolve had discussed the same issue on email!
scene: Simon and Abhi roll in, and arrows shown between their mailboxes
--

Then, it was time to create the sketches according to what was needed by the scenes. We drew simple characters, often using simple character illustrations as references. We then scanned these sketches, and adjusted the white balance on Photoshop to make the backgrounds appear "exactly" whilte.

The sketches were then imported into Flash CS4 as images and then converted to movieclips. We used an as3 tweener library TweenMax. It is an easy to use library with which you can do a lot of good looking transitions very easily. So we placed the movieclips on different layers and worked out the animations for each of them. Syncing with audio was the hardest part and had to be done manually mostly. We embedded the mp3 audio file in the flash file and corrected the audio video syncing manually. This was painstaking, but we knew no other way.

Importing the video from flash was tricky. Since the complete animation was done in actionscript the "Import to Video" option in Flash CS4 did not work. Camtasia came to our rescue here!  We ran the swf animation file and did a screen video capture in camtasia with audio running in the background. Over the capture, we added a couple of zoom effects that can be done easily with Camtasia.

And voila! We had our shiny new product video. View below.

 

We've found the bangalore startup community and tech community to be very active and supportive. We had a great focus group session at bangalore on13th Nov at the Egg Factory, St Marks road. A great bunch of enthusiastic participants turned up.

First the food - Its great at the Egg Factory. The music tends to be a bit loud at times for good conversation, but bent on having a nice discussion, we got hold of a couple of tables and launched right into our agenda. The group consisted of some existing users of GrexIt, and some who had heard about us and were yet to try out the tool.

Here are our major take-aways from the meeting:

• Wiki like 'editability', if available over the discussions stored on GrexIt, can be very useful.
• Some users might already be using some tool or system to store knowledge and information. Examples: Google docs, wikis, Google sites etc. It would be great if GrexIt could integrate with them.
• Some easy way to add discussions to GrexIt without having to use the plugin would be great. Update from us - we're coming out with a feature soon that lets you add a discussion to GrexIt along with all attachments and followups by just forwarding it once to catch@grexit.com. (this email id was suggested to us by Karan Vasudeva of Codeboff - Thanks Karan!)
• Powerful search would help. Users want to be able to filter by labels, senders and discussion participants. Update - Advanced search is coming in a week!
• Some messages from a discussion added to GrexIt might not be of a public nature. We're working on a feature to allow you to quickly and easily remove those messages from GrexIt.
• Users want to see GrexIt search results right inside their inbox. Update from us - we're scheduling it for our next major release.

Its always a privilege to be interacting with users and enthusiasts who can provide such smart and pointed feedback. Many thanks to you guys, and we'd be talking again soon. You can write in to us at nitesh@grexit.com and niraj@grexit.com anytime.

After the GrexIt Focus Group in Delhi, we're now having one in Bangalore on 13th November, Saturday, 12 noon, at The Egg Factory (Ground Floor, White House, St. Marks Road - more details here)

Agenda:

• Understanding how you use email, and what issues you face while relying heavily on email for collaboration
• What tools you use for collaboration and task-management, and how email plays with those tools
• Tell you guys about GrexIt
• Understand what you feel about how GrexIt can be useful to you.

If you are a heavy email user, a Google Apps user, an entrepreneur, a blogger or a geek, you're invited to join us. Just to tempt you a bit more, we're buying lunch :)

RSVP here: http://goo.gl/H0k6A. If you have any questions, write in to niraj@grexit.com. See you there.

We had our first Focus Group at Sancho's in Connaught Place, Delhi. Proof? Find Below :) It was a small gathering, but we managed to kick it off, and we're now going to follow it up with another one in Bangalore this week.

 

We had a great conversation on GrexIt and email usage in general over nachos and burritos, and we got a lot of clarity on what we're going to spend our energies building over the next few weeks:

• Access Controls are important. Project Managers who attended the Focus Group wanted this feature to be at the top of the list.
• Everyone wanted capability to add threads to GrexIt from their phones
• Users wanted to know what we do for security. We directed them to this page
• Users wanted to have the ability to edit labels names, and delete labels

We're going to roll out all of the above over the next few weeks. We're looking forward to meeting more of our potential and current users in Bangalore this week.

We just went live with our video on http://grexit.com. Before we had this video, a new visitor to the site had to understand what the tool could do for them by the copy and some static images that we had on the home page. There were some problems with that:

• We found it very hard to convey what GrexIt could do for users without using copious amounts of text. No one wanted to read that.
• We tried a combination of text and some alternating images. Problem - How GrexIt can make your life easy is a larger story, and we found it hard to convey with some alternating images and a little bit of text.
• Our earlier attempts with text and images created a huge amount of clutter on the home page.

While we were getting more than 100 new visitors everyday on http://grexit.com on many days, a very small number of them  were translating to registered users. Since we assume that we have built something that can be valuable to users, the only reason we could think of for vistors coming to the site and not registering while being in their right minds was that they did not understand what the tool could do for them.

We saw this as a big problem. Big enough for us to stop all our coding and marketing, and get onto doing something which would give us a better chance of conveying to a site vistor how GrexIt could make their lives better.

We figured we needed this:

• An engaging way of telling our whole story without the visitor dozing off. We wanted to talk about the problem we were solving, how we were solving it, and how cool our solution really was.
• Make sure visitors understand our offering correctly. That meant having a sharp and clear message on the site, which drew the vistor in immediately.

And this is what we thought we'll build:

• We decided to remove every item that did not make sense to a visitor within 15 seconds of them landing on the site. That meant the titles of our blogs and our twitter feed had to go. Why? Because why would a visitor want to know what we're saying on Twitter if they hadn't first understood what we offered.
• Given we had to tell a story, a video was the best way to talk to the visitor. The challenge was to convey the idea to the visitor as quickly as possible, and without the chance of the visitor's attention wandering off at all.

And you see the result of the train of thoughts mentioned above on our home-page. Coming next on our blog - Exactly how we created the video.

We are doing a Focus Group in Delhi on GrexIt at 2 PM on 6th Nov, 2010, at Sancho's in CP. Agenda:

• Understanding how you use email, and what issues you face while relying heavily on email for collaboration
• What tools you use for collaboration and task-management, and how email plays with those tools
• Tell you guys about GrexIt
• Understand what you feel about how GrexIt can be useful to you.

If you are a heavy email user, a Google Apps user, an entrepeneur, a blogger or a geek, you're invited to join us. Just to tempt you a bit more, we're buying lunch :)

See you there. Just RSVP at goo.gl/sDGI, and drop a mail to niraj@grexit.com if you have any questions. See you there.