I had 30 mins to come up with 5,490 pieces of shareable content
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I had 30 mins to come up with 5,490 pieces of shareable content
Sounds crazy? Here's what happened.
The brief
I wanted to create a soft-sell awareness-raising campaign to publicise my voiceover services to work in tandem with my other marketing.
I gave myself half an hour to come up with a content idea that met the following criteria.
the content should showcase my voiceover skills - straight announcer and character voices.
it should give me an opportunity to write some stupid stuff.
it should be entertaining and educational.
the idea must be iterative.
it needs to be short-form.
it MUST be fun!
I put a deadline on my brainstorming session to avoid ‘drift.’
It worked!
The idea
I came up with a super-simple concept for shareable short-form video content.
I’ve called it Slanguage.
Here’s how it works.
I say a rarely-used word.
I say the definition of the word.
I record a daft sentence of me saying the word in a funny voice.
That’s Slanguage.
I told my husband the outline of the idea and he said, “Why don’t you add ‘Got an word? Slang it to me.’”
The man is a genius.
With the idea defined, we needed to package it into something workable.
The look and feel
We wanted it to be:
bright and bold
informal
accessible
Here’s the first prototype of our animated logo.
Developing the sonic ident
The logo needed a sonic ident, so we processed a synthetic voice saying “Slanguage” and added a recording we made of a hole-punch.
We mixed the voice with a tiny bit of distortion, dipped the pitch and slowed it down a tad.
I really like how the AI voice contrasts with my human voice. Its obvious inhumanity seems to accentuate my voice’s human authenticity. I also think it has an appealing retro quality that somehow makes the production sound contemporary.
We edited and multi-tracked the hole punch sound to make it into something that’s the audio equivalent of a ‘tick.’ ✅
We wanted the sonic ident to give every Slanguage video a quirky vibe of optimistic finality, ending each video with a flourish, as if we’re saying ‘Taaaa-daaaa!’
Have a listen and you’ll hear what I mean.
We made it sensory friendly.
My eldest child El is autistic. El is also the producer of the Slanguage videos.
We wanted to be mindful of ensuring the content wasn’t going to give viewers (and El!) sensory overload.
This meant:
choosing a simple font
carefully thinking through how much info was on the screen at any one time, including icons, text, thumbnails etc.
making the three-act structure of the Slanguage videos super easy to process: cognitively, visually and aurally.
Take a look at this film to learn how El did it.
We made sure it’d be OK for people who are colour-blind
El put a lot of work into this. Watch this film. El is amazing.
Finding the words and definitions
I am a massive word nerd and have lots of dictionaries, notes, Pocket saves, reference books, all my notes from my English Language A Level course and materials for an Open University sociolinguistics course I did ages ago.
Which, for this idea, is fortuitous.
I created a spreadsheet with all the weird words, definitions and silly sentences.
Recording and editing the audio
There’s a lot of audio to handle in this project.
Altogether, there are 1,098 wav files. (366 videos, with 3 audio files each).
But recording and editing audio is my bread and butter, so…
The production workflow
With so many Slanguage videos to make, we developed a smooth workflow so we can easily see where we’re up to with every single piece of content in each video.
This is how we manage the backstage area of Slanguage.
Managing content recycling
I made a Notion template - basically a spreadsheet. This includes:
Original publication date
YouTube url
∑ 6 months
∑ 12 months
∑ 18 months
∑ 24 months
This means each video can be shared 5 times, across social channels using the YouTube URL.
That gives us a helluva lot of shareable content.
The videos can be repurposed over two years, giving us 1,830 iterations.
If we share those iterations on 3 platforms (TikTok, Insta and Facebook), that’s 5,490 bits of content.
It’s a lot.
And that’s not counting featuring specials on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads (and maybe Twitter-no-it’s-not-called-that-any-more-pfft-whatever) etc.
So while I didn’t create 5,490 bits of content in 30 mins, I did get the concept and strategy scoped out.
And now we’re rolling out Slanguage!
If you’d like to subscribe to the YouTube Playlist, click here.
Here’s the Slanguage Facebook page.
Me and El really hope you like it! :)
If you like my stuff, you can buy me a coffee!