Our developers have worked hard to ensure that you can create your own video on your very first day in Vyond Studio. Truly mastering the art of video communication, however, takes a bit more time.
Luckily, the myth that mastery requires 10,000 hours turned out to be false, and practice isn’t the only way to get good at something. Nevertheless, experience goes a long way if you want to create masterful content. Vyond Studio is packed with advanced features to bring even the most complex ideas to life, but those capabilities may feel out of reach to new makers. That’s where Robb Bingham comes in.
As an experienced learning strategist, Robb works on the team Converging Solutions—one of our affiliates—to transform learning and development at medium and large businesses. Over several years of developing content for eLearning, marketing, and internal communications, he’s picked up expert-level mastery of telling a story with video.
He uses those skills to help new members of the Vyond Maker Community learn everything they need to know to get started quickly in Vyond Studio. We interviewed Robb to hear how he shares the power with even the most nervous novices.
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Interview with Robb Bingham of Converging Solutions
At Converging Solutions, you offer a Vyond Quick Start workshop. How did you get your own start with Vyond?
Converging Solutions came to Vyond after using a more limited animated software program because we wanted Vyond’s more advanced capabilities like lip sync, motion paths, and a broad set of characters and templates.
We were impressed, and the jump for our team was pretty easy from some of those other tools. We found the Vyond Resource Library to be most helpful! We were also able to learn quickly (and frequently) in Vyond Studio from our own trial and error.
As we began to introduce new team members to Vyond, we realized that there was an easier way to get people up to speed quickly. Maybe “easier” isn’t the right word, because it’s pretty intense! (But it’s also a lot of fun!) We created an opportunity for them to learn by doing in a workshop experience. More on that later!
Your work spans learning, internal communications, marketing, and more. How does video fit into all that?
At its core—at least when it’s done well—an animated video tells a story.
That allows us to use Vyond for many of our client projects. Here’s a shortlist of some ways we’ve found animation to be incredibly helpful and sets our deliverables apart:
Learning
At the top of the course, instead of starting with a boring list of objectives, we start the course with a video like this one that illustrates the difference the course content will make in the learner’s life. (“What’s in it for me?”)
In the middle of the course, we use video to illustrate a case study and bring otherwise dry topics to life!
Communications
Instead of sending out a company card at Thanksgiving like every other company, we made a holiday video. It took a few more hours, but it also made an impactful impression of our company and highlighted our desire to make a positive difference for our clients.
Marketing
In the marketing space, your animated video should generally have a direct call to action. The story can really spell out a specific pain-point and help the viewer understand why they must take action now.
(This video was the first one completed by our newest team member.)
Other times, the call to action isn’t as glaringly obvious. For example, when we promote our Vyond Workshop, we provide a link to the sizzle reel below. The purpose here is primarily to validate credibility as an expert in the field. The call to action in this case is communicated in the marketing piece that contains the link instead of within the video itself.
What are some key themes you cover in the Vyond Quick Start workshop?
While storytelling isn’t the sole focus of our Vyond Quick Start workshop, it is a significant theme for the first segment. Why? Because no matter how good your development skills are in Vyond, if you aren’t telling a compelling story, you are missing the entire point!
It would be like trying to walk without a skeleton. You need those bones to provide structure and create leverage for muscles to work together to go anywhere! Similarly, the story is where you start from, and we start the workshop talking about an endless number of ways to start your story that can grab the viewer’s attention.
From that foundation, the workshop is mostly about getting up to speed developing in Vyond as quickly as possible. Attendees get hands-on right away with some guided activities and rapid-fire feedback from peers and developers. A lot of the workshop is spent in breakout rooms where attendees get to apply concepts just covered and get real-time support as they work. It’s been such a popular format, and people wrap up the day with a major jump-start on the idea they brought into the workshop.
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How have attendees described the experience of participating in your Vyond Quick Start workshop?
Everyone who has gone through the workshop so far has described the session as one of the most efficient ways they’ve experienced to get up to speed quickly and start developing projects that they really feel proud to share with others. This very-full one-day workshop experience leaves the attendee:
- Feeling like they’ve mastered the basics.
“I learned more in this one day than in a month on my own!” - Helping new Vyond developers learn what GOOD looks like.
“I learned so much from all the examples the instructors shared, as well as how to leverage, learn from, and repurpose the templates… what a booster-shot for rapid development!” - Outlining a specific list of next-step topics to finalize their project and continue the progress made along their rapid learning curve.
“I really feel like I can finish the project I’m working on now in a few more hours rather than days or weeks!”
Who should attend the Vyond Quick Start workshop?
I’d say there are three primary audiences that see the most benefit from our Vyond Quick Start workshop:
- Newbie developers to Vyond who know they want to learn to animate videos, but have limited time because video development is not their “day job.”
- Anyone that’s started to use Vyond and got bogged down with the basics or became intimidated by the limited progress they’ve made and want some mentorship to improve it.
- eLearning, Communications, or Marketing specialists that really want to set their deliverables apart, and want to learn how to make their projects look as professional as possible as quickly as possible.
The bottom line is if you want to get up to speed making Vyond videos as quickly as possible, and get several pro-tips to chew on right away, then this workshop is a no-brainer! We’ve also offered it up to design teams as a virtual professional development day, which is a great way to build a sense of team, learn and laugh (a lot) together in the middle of our pandemic world events. We have 2-3 developers that co-lead the session so it really helps keep everyone interested and highly engaged!
With Vyond, you can make media that moves.
Vyond Studio gives you all the tools you need to master the art of video. When you give your team the power of Vyond, you’re also giving them access to a broad community of makers like Robb and a team of supportive video experts to guide them along. Give yourself a kick start with Converging Solutions, or take a look yourself with a free trial of Vyond.
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