---
title: "Catalyst 1: Audiovisual Role (Overlooked)"
date: 2010-04-20
description: "From Overlooked to Center Stage   1.0 Presenting at the Atlanta Currents Conference (Overlooked)   1.1 Intro..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2010/04/20/catalyst-1-audiovisual-role-from-overlooked-to-center-stage/
---
# Catalyst 1: Audiovisual Role (Overlooked)
It was my first experience in an [agile environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development). And although there was one other technical writer and a manager at the organization, I was the go-to technical writer in my assigned department.

Not many people had worked with technical writers before in the department, surprisingly. Although the IT organization had been in existence for years, it had only gotten serious about IT for the past two years, and all this time the technical writers were scarce and never centralized. Here I would begin to see my role change from just a writer to something more.

All people expected of me was to create a manual for their product. I was brought into the portfolio manager's office, and he explained the projects I would be working on for the next couple of years. I could very well have continued on in the same role I had previously played -- quietly documenting what I had been asked to document. Creating little reference manuals and online help. Doing no more than fulfill the wishes of the portfolio manager.

Initially I assumed the environment would be the same as before -- with a specific list of the applications I could install, a defined list of help formats I had to produce, a style guide I had to carefully conform to. But I soon realized that none of these restrictions were in place. I could install anything, deliver anything, and do it all according to the styles I wanted.

I remember sitting one day in the portfolio manager's office explaining that I wanted to use a different help authoring tool. He kind of shrugged and said, Why don't you?

I already had the software, I said. 

Then why don't you use it? he asked. I kind of paused, like a prisoner just unchained might do with his first step of freedom. I felt liberation inside.

I always felt video was a neglected component in the help authoring deliverables. Very few technical writers actually deliver video with their documentation. Managers don't ask it of them, and if you think about translation, it's easy to dismiss video out of cost alone.

And yet, when I needed to learn a new software tool, I seemed to always turn to video. In our organization, videos were often produced by other the audiovisual department. In fact, the audiovisual department had more than a fifty year legacy in creating multimedia. They had more voiceover experts alone than we had technical writers.

Additionally, I had no e-learning background, no studio or fancy microphone, and no real knowledge of how it was to be done. Still, videos were always something I had wanted to produce at my former company, so I set about making them.

With the first software release, I produced an online help and a printable PDF, as well as several [quick reference guides](https://idratherbewriting.com/quickreferenceguides/) (which actually made the manager so happy he started to cry), but I also produced videos. I made about twenty of them. I hardly knew what I was doing, so they were all caption based rather than voice based. I had to stay up all night to finish them before the deadline to include them in the application release, but I did it.

About a month after the release, the department manager asked if I could actually create some videos. Huh, I thought? Wasn't that what I had already done? What they had in mind, it turns out, was something with voice. I had been doing podcasting, but I never felt I had the voice talent to be the narrator for professional work videos. My voice was too wavy, too amateur.

With the next release, I started to drop the inhibitions about my own voice and recorded a new round of video tutorials with voice. My voice. Not relying on a voiceover talent to create the voice component. It was exhilarating, using my own voice. I suddenly had full control over the entire process. I showed a voice-based video to a colleague and a caption-based video asked him to compare. He said he preferred the voice-based video about 10 times more than the silent video with captions.