http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEKJlqDzSVk

Shot as a potential promotional video. Comments?

My hearing may be the culprit here, but after two times through, I still found the echo-speak of the robot largely unintelligible. No good for a promo, where first impressions are everything. Maybe crank the reverb back a bit?? It really is hard to understand and I'm very familiar with the subject!

I first thought you were referring to Al Gore.......or Dick Cheney, just to be fair, but he resembles Darth Vader more.

Danger, Will Robinson........

Gotta agree, not much of a robot, looks more like a guy in a robot suit with real bad jerky camera cuts done by 8th graders in the AV club in 1969.

dave

I suspect that this ad would appeal to a younger audience... as in less than 40, probably closer to the museum's real visitor demographic (parents with young children, the ones who like the little blue guy.)

I work for a city recreation department, and we are increasingly spending time studying "Generational Marketing"... i.e. what appeals to the "gray beards" (myself included) does not play well to a 20 something...

Marketers typically (this varies based on who you listen to) identify the groups as Seniors (born before 1945), Baby boomer (born 1945-early 1960's), Gen X (1965-1980s), and Gen Y also known as Menlenium (from the mid 1980's on)

If you accept the premise, then the problem in small organizations is that the ones making decisions are from the Senior or Baby boomer groups, and we generally pick things that appeal to us... instead of that that appeals to our target audience (or worse, as rail enthusiasts we fail to identify our audience)

The audio is awful. It is a real turn off with the stilted monotone delivery and way too much cheap reverb. The audio could be done with a real actor using a normal speaking voice in a voice over if he introduced himself in the first shot..........something like "Hello there. I'm B-9 from the planet K-28 (or whatever). I've been visiting Baltimore and look what I found, etc.). You want an actor with a nice warm friendly voice.

Been there. Done that with lots of VO's.

fk

Well the subject matter is a bit too geeky... No reason to mention "Peter Witt" unless you're going to dive into an explanation of what that means.

As for the voice, that's the classic robot voice filter... which muddies verbal information. The new, cool way to get vocal effects is the misuse of Auto-Tune. Which, being designed to correct vocals, preserves them pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYzv-AVi78E

Can't disagree with Randy's perspective, but that's still no excuse for less than polished and competent technical production, no matter what the content or audience you are trying to reach. There's a lot of well done stuff being produced that doesn't interest me - the Olympics, as a very recent example - but I can't quibble with how well it was technically produced. The boring figure skating my wife loves to watch was well lit and photographed smoothly and professionally. Recent episodes of House, a show I really like to see, have been plagued by the use of shaky handheld cameras which annoy me and distract me from the content - mostly decently written scripts about interesting people doing interesting things that require thought. I wish they would get back into more science and less romantic drivel......graybeard here.

dave

The robot voice seems to be one of the standard Mac voices. In fact, I bet the whole video was done a Mac using iMovie and Mac VoiceOver.

Cost? Probably damn near zero. Maybe B9 cost 5 bucks.

And for a video that is obviously targeted towards kids (listen carefully!), I think this is a score. A little corny, a little geeky, but made in a way that most young people can instantly relate to.

--
Will

Did you get the rights from Space Productions/ Synthesis Entertainment to use the Robot?

Okay, before we bash this poor soul too far......

I've been misinformed, or someone jumped to the wrong conclusion. I was able to track down the maker of this, er, "short," and she did it strictly as a college class project for a class at the very-nearby University of Baltimore. The robot is there because they had to use some small object as the focus of the presentation. It's not meant as any serious effort as a promo or anything.

Here is a promo video for a near by Railroad Museum, that I saw on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0