Badass: Making Users Awesome - did you have input into the promotional video?

[Michael Swierczek]

( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036593.do for anyone that hasn't seen it )

That's hilarious. I love it. Did someone else come up with it, or was it all you? I'm just curious.

Thanks for participating in the book giveaway.

(Edit: I respectfully suggest, for any Ranch admins, that the site link to the book go to the OReilly page instead of the Amazon page. If you have financial incentives or contractual obligations to link to Amazon, I understand. But I think the video and the PDF preview on O'Reilly make a much more compelling sales pitch for the book. )

[Kathy Sierra]

I'm glad you love it!!

It was all me.

three things:

* I love video -- it's fast becoming my number one hobby.

* I had very little budget (and only out of my own pocket), so I couldn't do what, say, Tim Ferris did and hire a team. It had to be something I could make myself.

* I had been using the "don't treat users like stock photo people" in my presentations recently and it suddenly hit me that I could just build that "story".

I had SO MUCH FUN making it. I didn't think it would be possible until I started searching through the stock video footage on Shutterstock and realized just how much there was that used the same model(s). Though their search engine did NOT make this easy. They have a "same model" view, but it only gives you a tiny handful of shots with that same model, and no way to search on ALL of the. So instead I had to look at the company that submitted the video, then view their ENTIRE portfolio (often HUGE) and just keep searching for shots of the same people. Then other things were just the result of stock keyword searches.

I was surprised and delighted by what I kept finding there. And also surprised and delighted by the high quality. One thing that was a little tricky was trying to make footage by different videographers and using entirely different cameras and frame rates and everything somehow look like they belonged together. I didn't really nail it, but it still worked for my purposes ;)