The first pass of the audio for the Loggly intro video was finished today. The clip will be used to further refine the wording of the script and start assembling the various visual elements we’ll need for shooting the video. What we should end up with is something similar to the works by Common Craft.

Not surprisingly, it took a TON of work to get the clip to its current state. Most of that work involved writing and editing the ’script’ to sound like the actor was talking to an audience. I’m no script writer, so it took a fair amount of work with Brenda (the voice actor to whom I’m married) to nail down what sounded natural when spoken, and what didn’t. There are still some rough spots, but here’s the final version of the first draft if you want to take a listen. The script is here, less some final edits.

Back in the day, when John Leestma and I were involved in producing the Splunk Videos, we would do outtakes of the different developers doing their thing during filming. You had to do something to keep things entertaining – a 5 minute video would take all day to film and occupy 1/3 of the available conference rooms. It’s really too bad we didn’t publish them, some of them were side splitting.

Speaking of cracking up, the wife and I have always enjoyed a good laugh together. Here’s hoping you get a hoot from our silly outtakes. All your logs are belong to us!

I bought a Baby Blue Bottle mic for my wife a few years back. She’s an opera singer, and can actually belt out some serious tunes when the mood strikes her. With her pipes and this mic we’ve gotten some amazing takes. If you’ve never seen/handled/heard a Blue mic, well, it’s a thing of joy to behold.

Now I’m working on Loggly fulltime, I realized we need a video which would explain the product in an easy to digest format, along the lines of the Twitter in Plain English video. It struck me I have all the bits I need to do this myself, including an amazing performer voice (albeit not using her operatic mode) and a kick ass microphone.

Videos are one of those things that help brand your identity, along with your blog posts, tweets, and of course, your product. The way in which you present your product to the people who use/consume it helps sear your identity forever in their minds. Case in point, Bluebottle Coffee. A friend of mine took me there a few weeks back and I was blown away by the preparation process. It was a thing of art really, much like the Blue Bottle Mic.

Maybe we should name ourselves Blue Bottle Logs. Whaddya think?

Hello, we are Loggly, a startup located in San Francisco. As you can tell from our Web site, we are in the very early stages of our startup. Shoot, we haven’t even had a chance to let our designer take care of the Web site yet! So, tread with care – anything you find here is early stages!