At Impact Spokesperson, we get this question asked all the time. How can I make a virtual spokesperson for my website? Unfortunately I will not get into the specifics to protect our proprietary secrets. I will say that it takes a good amount of money to do this as well as knowledge of two main areas 1) filming and 2) computer programming.
Before I talk about the two areas, I do want to talk about cost. Not to discourage you, but to be honest. It’s great to window shop, but when it comes down to swiping the credit card or writing the check, we tend to evaluate things with a sense of reality. When you add up the cost for the camera, studio lights, green screen, mics, teleprompter, computer software and etc. you have made a pretty costly investment and that is just in equipment and software. To give you an idea of cost, we have over $15,000.00 in filming equipment. That is not including, staff, talent, studio or any other expenditure that might be involved and ongoing.
Let me talk about talent. The talent makes up over 75% of the success of your video project. The other 25% is script. What you say is important, but how you say it is even more important. You can have a well written script and have a horrible actor or better yet an unprofessional actor read your script and the message can be lost in the delivery. I might have already mentioned this, but good talent cost good money. They don’t work for free.
Ok, if you still are with me and I didn’t lose you after talking about the cost then congratulations you are ready to move on to the next part.
The filming of your website spokesperson requires knowledge of filming, directing, editing, lighting, operating a teleprompter and sound. You have to film in front of a green screen. The green screen and the talent need to be properly lit. The more work you do right in the studio, the less work you will have to do in editing the composition. The same goes with sound engineering. You can have a great looking video and the audio be poor and it drags the whole project down. The two big expenditures in the filming are the camera and the microphones. Cheap equipment produces cheap results.
Once you have your clip recorded, now you need to upload it to your computer and key out the green screen. There are a couple of software options available that offer this, but again you get what you pay for. Two things that you need to keep in mind. First video files are large and large files take time to load over the internet. Secondly, when you encode your video file you lose quality. The real key is finding the balance. You don’t want a large file size nor do you want to lose the quality of the video. Enhancing your video and audio may be needed. This all takes place in the editing phase of your video project.
Ok, now you have you website spokesperson filmed and you have keyed out the green screen now you need to know how to program in flash, javascript and dhtml which is another article in and of itself. So what is the best solution? Leave it to the professionals. Honestly. If you are looking at getting into this business to make money, I recommend a reseller package for you. There is no start-up cost, no headache over software. If you are looking at doing this for your website, I recommend that you hire a professional company like us who specializes in this field. Get a Professional Virtual Spokesperson for your site.
