One of my goals in creating engaging video tutorials is to develop a warm, personable, natural voice, like the voice of an encouraging friend or mentor. In search of this more personable voice, last year I attended a voiceover workshop in my area. The voiceover coach explained that good voiceover artists start by imagining a situation—in their minds they imagine who they are, who they’re … more »

Alistair Christie recently published a podcast about Unscripted Screencasts and Flare Extensibility. In the podcast, he considers whether scripts are necessary for corporate screencasts –  a good topic for exploration and testing. But he also gets into something a little more interesting: extending Flare with jQuery. jQuery is the new Javascript. It provides smooth functionality that shows and hides components, slides objects around, and animates … more »

At the last voice workshop I attended, the instructor (Scott) gave us scripts to read and then critiqued our performance. I tried to imagine myself talking to a friend rather than reading the script, but it didn’t come across with much effect. Scott said I was being too reserved, too monotone. I realized that my conversation technique with voice overs, which I wrote about with … more »