"What is Drupal?" video wins six Telly Awards

The short video "What is Drupal?" won six Telly Awards, it was announced earlier this month. The video, produced by pingVision, is a fast-paced promo-style introduction to Drupal. The total running time is about a minute.

The video had its "premiere" of sorts at South by SouthWest this year, playing in the Acquia booth in the Trade Show area. I confess my own surprise when even the tech-savvy SxSW crowd was largely ignorant of Drupal. (Disclosure: pingVision is an Acquia Platinum Partner.)

We created the video in an attempt to answer just what the heck Drupal is to the masses of people who ask that question every day. We made it short and fast-paced because we believe that's what the web demands. People want answers now and don't want to sit through "um" and "er". One thing I learned from producing promos and trailers is that people can absorb information incredibly quickly in a video. In the amount of time some videos take to slow-fade-up their main title, we've already pointed out that Drupal is considered a Content Management System and an Application Framework. And if the video goes by too fast, the viewer can watch again. It won't take a minute.

The video was produced on an Apple Mac Pro using Final Cut Studio, at 720p resolution. The 3D motion graphics and compositing were created in Apple's Motion. Audio was mixed using Soundtrack Pro. The voiceover (not universally appreciated, it seems) was by yours truly. We used library music for the soundtrack. It's hard to put a number on the hours, but it was probably about 20-25 hours of postproduction once the script was together and the screenshots were gathered. The final FLV video files were encoded using Sorensen Squeeze. It was something of a challenge, as the rapid on-screen motion and cuts made conventional forms of P-frame and B-frame compression of limited value.

The Telly Awards website says:

The Telly Awards honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web.

Since 1978, our mission has been to strengthen the visual arts community by inspiring, promoting, and supporting creativity. The 29th Annual Telly Awards received over 14,000 entries from all 50 states and 5 continents.

http://tellyawards.com/awards

Judges evaluate entries to recognize distinction in creative work — entries do not compete against each other. Instead, entries are judged against a high standard of merit. Judges score entries on a performance scale and winning entries are recognized and awarded as Silver or Bronze Winners based on the combined scoring of the judges who evaluate each entry. Empowered to uphold the historical standards of the Telly competition, judges may award top honors to more than one entry or no entries in a particular category. All decisions of judges are final.

http://tellyawards.com/awards/judging/

More information can be found on the Telly Awards Fact Sheet [PDF] and the Press Release.

The video is presented below.

pingVision, which was producing video and designing DVDs before Drupal work took over in 2005, plans to release more videos in the coming months.