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November 16th, 2009 | Posted in Screencasting 9 Comments »
Harry Miller is a multimedia enthusiast who brings his expertise with film and audio to the screencasting world at his job at Microsoft. The following three videos are some of the most creative, mesmerizing video tutorials on Visio I’ve ever seen.
Create an organization chart using video
These video tutorials don’t just teach you how to create various charts in Visio. They make you want to be as cool as Harrison Clarity is with Visio.
More about Harry Miller
Update: Here’s a podcast where Harry Miller talks with his colleagues about their techniques and strategies in creating these videos.
Tags: cinema, harry miller, mesmerizing, videos
Tom,
This is exactly what a friend and I were talking about last week. My tutorials are SO DULL. “In this tutorial, we will learn….” blah blah boring. I’m not sure how, but I must try to write an engaging script. Any ideas where to start?
Thanks for the inspiration.
Maeve
Well, I don’t think anyone can jump in and start creating the kinds of videos Harry has done here. Also, while they are highly entertaining, interesting, and fun to watch, I’m not so sure that more straight-to-the-point, here’s-how-you-do-it video tutorials aren’t just as gratifying to the reader who is trying to learn how to do a specific task. Harry’s purpose here is to try to create interest, not just explain how to do a task.
Tom, thanks for your comments on Harry and Ron’s series. You inspired this post on Inside Office Online http://bit.ly/KhkJH. I used to be the tech editor for Visio help content, and now work on the IOO Blog. Harry writes for Visio now and I’m delighted to see how cleverly he and Ron are showing off what Visio can do. We’re creating a lot of video now for Office how-to so I appreciate your and your readers’ opinions on what does and doesn’t work.
Holly, thanks for your comment. Also, thanks for linking to me from the Microsoft Office Online Blog. I like how innovative you are with your help content. If you have any other new techniques, especially with multimedia, I would be interested to learn about it.
Thanks Tom. I’ve passed your comment onto my Help-writing, video-making colleagues. We really appreciate your feedback because we’re always looking for ways to make our content more effective.
Tom,
What a coincidence- I just wrote a blog post about the dullness of many screencasts and got a great reply from one of my readers who provides a few links to other screencasts that combine cinema. some of them are awesome. Check out his reply here http://www.vademogirl.com/the-harsh-truth-about-screencasts/
Michelle
Thanks Michelle. I was just checking out Scott’s site. It looks like he has a good resource for screencasters. Thanks for the tip.
Harry’s purpose here is to try to create interest, not just explain how to do a task.
It’s unbelievable how you can take a boring thing such as a tutorial, and with creativity and inspiration, turn it into something amazing.
It made me want to watch it just for the fun of it, and I’m sure that it can run well on youtube just as a video clip regardless of its tutorial purpose…
A job well done!