Laughter can be good for business. People tend to like people and things (and companies) that make them laugh. And while a number of offline brands have a reputation for making their customers giggle, few online brands have succeeded in this area. While this means we’re not competing against a bunch of hilarious online travel agencies (and therefore, arguably, could get away with coming off a little stuffily), I don’t want LetMeGo to be just another boring online service. That is why, when it came time for us to create the intro videos that would explain our service to new travelers, we decided not to use standard, boring narration. Instead, we created five funny video tours narrated by (impersonations of) famous people or characters. Several people have asked me how we made them. Here is the short version:
A few months ago, we were talking about this topic with Treeny, our Customer Service Manager. She came up with the idea of having the intro video of LetMeGo narrated by a famous person in a funny way. I then passed this idea on to Brett, our Marketing Consultant and Copywriter. He loved the idea, and we immediately began brainstorming the characters and people who would best narrate the videos. This was more challenging than I originally expected: First of all, we needed memorable, English-language voices that would be recognized internationally (after all, LetMeGo is an international service). Secondly, can you think of internationally famous female voices that you would hear and immediately recognize? There aren’t many, right? In what a macho world we live in! Anyway, a few days later, we had agreed upon the voices we wanted. Now we needed to contact the famous people…
We posted several projects in Voice123 looking for voice-over talents capable of performing famous voices. We were pleased by the sheer number of great auditions, all of whom offered their services at very reasonable prices (I realize that seeming to plug our very own company in this blog post is perhaps a bit gauche, but it’s true–we got really good results through Voice 123). Brett then wrote the scripts and we sent them to the selected talents for recording. After a few days and a few takes, all of the recordings were ready. We then normalized them using Audacity. That way, all of the voices share a similar volume level.
While waiting for the recording to be delivered, Maestro, LetMeGo’s Web Designer, and I started working on the visuals of the videos. The stills in the video are screenshots of Firefox at its maximum zoom, with colors retouched in Aperture. The lighting effect is obtained by using a vignette effect. The videos contain scenes of users typing words. They were captured using Snap Pro X. We then took both the visuals and the recordings and created the videos using iMovie.
After the videos were ready, Alberto worked on the closed captioning and the coding required to make them play nicely in the site. We use FlowPlayer for that.
In terms of cost and time, this is what we invested: The talents were paid USD 300 each. Brett invested around thirteen hours. Maestro and Alberto each invested around two days. I invested three. And the return we expect on this investment? The intangible, but vital benefit of letting our customers know that we are funny, fun-loving people, instead of some faceless Internet company.
Alexander Torrenegra
Alexander is LetMeGo's co-founder and jefe. Here is his LetMeGo 
