We were recently approached by TypeMock to help bring their beloved Armadillo to life. Armadillo is an adaptive bug prevention system that they describe like this:
Armadillo works by dynamically learning your code and how you check it, creating validation scenarios. These scenarios are continuously verified as you modify your code. If a software bug is detected, Armadillo pinpoints the bug so you can debug and fix it without running the whole application.
Because they already had such an interesting product name and logo, we had the pleasure of adapting them to create the main character, Alex. He eats bugs for breakfast!
Check out the video and let us know what you think…
We just completed another really great, fully animated, cartoon clip. While we pride ourselves on our signature RapidFire Video style videos with fast-changing images and kinetic text, we do have requests for these cartoon clips. And we LOVE working on them.
Our most recent project was for a new website called Hometalk.com. It’s a social network for people who care about their homes and gardens. Folks can sign up to read what folks in their town or region are saying, browse pictures, and ask or answer questions about home and garden projects. Hometalk is the place to find information about projects ranging from staining a deck to building outdoor mosaics to removing hardwater stains, or redesigning a kitchen and more.
Check out the short video about Charlie and his kitchen…
This one just wouldn’t have been the same using images and kinetic text, eh? We were still able to show how the site looks and tell a great story…we’re happy to have such great options to offer our clients.
We love helping others. And we love when other people help each other too. We recently completed a project for a Web site called CanAnybody, where folks can sign up to find or offer different kinds of services.
What we really loved about this one was that it covered so many different kinds of services…from catering to math to painting to music…and everything in between. So our challenge was to creatively illustrate as MUCH as we could in a short period of time…without boring the viewer. You’ll see in the video that we have several different sequences of images depicting services and each sequence is different. There’s the round sequence with the drums and the party platter…the hand sequence with the baby and the turtle…and so on…
The last B2B video we added to our portfolio was for a company called Evident. The product, ClearStone, is a comprehensive application performance management system. It’s a quite technical product which gave us the opportunity to get into our tech geek mode and find a creative way to explain something that can be a little confusing for folks who aren’t in the industry. Luckily, the folks who will see this one are also really geeky and they’ll know exactly what we’re saying.
Oh, how we love a good geeky product!
In their own words…
Evident ClearStone lets you monitor performance across NoSQL products, application servers, Java and web apps – all from a single dashboard. The ClearStone management packs extend the product, allowing you to monitor: Oracle Coherence, Memcached Stats, Cassandra Performance, JBoss Performance, WebLogic Performance, DataSynapse GridServer
When RapidFire Video began, we surveyed the marketplace to find the general price range of marketing videos. On the top end of the price range were the fancy 3D ones (which are quite expensive) and the simplest of the simple videos which are more like…ordinary PowerPoint presentations. We couldn’t really relate to either of the extremes, and we absolutely hate the idea of selling selling selling. As a small company, we prefer spending our time doing what we love to do…which is making really awesome marketing videos.
So what did we do? We found a price point at the lower end of the spectrum so that we wouldn’t have to waste so much time negotiating sales and could get right to the work. That’s the important part anyway, right? On the one hand, we could probably earn more per project. On the other hand, in two years, we’ve yet to have to make a sales call or haggle over price. Word of mouth and the attractiveness of the figures we quote has us booked pretty solid.
Recently though…we had an interesting development.
For a while, we had a specific kind of video…keeping everything quite simple. We had called our company RFV because in a typical 2-minute video, you could easily see almost 100 images, showing up “rapidfire.” It’s easy to make changes, even at the last minute, and it really keeps the viewer actively challenged, engaged and excited. Some simple animations help as transitions between images, but that’s it.
But as we grew and expanded our portfolio, we felt it was time to expand our offerings as well for specific clients with stories that really would benefit from a slightly more “animated” presentation. And so…it brings us great joy to introduce our new Premium video offering. It’s our same signature style with the added bonus of Adobe After Effects animations to bump it up a notch. It let’s us do some wild stuff with text, and really clever transitions and animation tricks. We had been hesitant to mess with our tried-and-true formula, but we found that this kind of animation didn’t detract from the messaging and our familiar look and feel…we hope you’ll agree!
Check out the Premium video we completed for the CareerBuilder Talent Network:
We had so much fun with this project. The After Effects really gave us the opportunity to be creative with our designs and opened up the doors for a lot of really cool animations.
Another Premium style we provide is fully animated like this one we did for a billing lockbox solution:
And to answer the obvious question, yes – Premium videos will cost a drop more than our classic version. Roughly a third more. But frankly, unless you’re on a very, very minimalist budget, the figures we quote you are still attractive. Instead of being below the low-end of the market, we’re simply at the low end. And considering it includes script writing (i.e. free marketing advice), the voiceover (a $200-$450 value) and the actual video, we’re pleased to simply have something to offer…everyone.
Be sure to check out our other Premium videos and everything else in our online portfolio.
Our latest project was for a company called Preton. They provide software that saves businesses on overhead by drastically reducing toner and ink usage. This video was quite fun for us because it forced us to think out of the box. Sometimes our clients have these crazy innovative little gadgets…and sometimes, like this time, we’re talking about printer ink. So how do you talk about things like printer ink while keeping the viewer engaged and wanting more?
…using creative analogies and imagery which the viewer can relate to and enjoy.
Like this…
What did you think? Did the snack food catch your eye?
Or maybe it was the bright colors?
…or maybe the $10 bills ;)
We’re so happy to announce our very first video for an iPhone app! We were really excited to work on it…we love iPhones and all the apps and we knew it would give us the opportunity to be even MORE creative and bold than usual. iPhone apps are designed for people with iPhones…and people with iPhones are generally labeled “fun!”
So yes…this video is fun. It’s for an app called iSnap.it.
And what is iSnap.it? iSnap.it is the only app that allows you to personalize your photos before you’ve even taken them.
We're the team behind RapidFire, and we help make your product into a story. That may be through a RapidFire video or other marketing tools.
This is where we get to rant and rave about great examples of online video, what we've been up to, and of course, entertainingly terrible examples of online video.
