Here at Rhyme & Reason Design, we don’t like to box ourselves into any one thing.  Yes, we love building websites and thrive on creating cohesive brands, but at the end of the day we embrace the idea that variety is truly the spice of life.  With an affinity for variety and my over eager approach at selling Rhyme & Reason’s services to anyone who even looks in my direction, I managed to wrangle us an inventor with a request that had us thinking far outside the box.

Our inventor needed an animated video of his invention that could be presented to the patent office and emailed to potential buyers.  Now mind you, I know Karen can make images dance with Flash and Erin can program just about anything we put in front of her, so I of course said an animated video was practically a piece of cake.  Well, in my enthusiastic haze, that often clouds my initial thought patterns, I didn’t think about the entire process of creating an animated video of something that doesn’t even exist.  Boy was that a learning curve I didn’t see coming.

You see an animated video is a beast, barely related to that of website design and development.  It takes skills and knowledge that go so far over my head that I think they may have landed somewhere out in the Adriatic Sea.  Luckily, our partner in digital animation was not only brilliant with his work but, amazingly patient in breaking down the process to a level that didn’t require a decoding manual.

All right, so we have a talented digital video designer – check.  Next, add audio to the video, again, I think no problem.  Again, I learn to keep a lid on my enthusiasm.  However, I do have a new, found respect for men and women who do voiceovers for cartoons, infomercials and radio ads.  Well actually, I didn’t have to try my hand at voice work, instead we enlisted the help of Erin’s boyfriend – he has a way better voice than all of us and was a willing volunteer.  I don’t think he will be volunteering for R&R projects anytime soon. No but, seriously he has quite the voice and when you listen to the 20 cuts he made for the first 30 seconds of audio it becomes quite melodic, oh wait that was the music I had on to tune it out – just kidding.  I did in fact listen very closely to all the cuts and it’s a good thing because a few Barry White renditions were thrown into the mix that I don’t think would have caused the same uproarious laughter from our inventor.

After reading through this entire blog, I bet you are dying to know what our inventor invented, well, we are still awaiting final approval from the patent office, but when the good word comes in, we will break out the cigars, pop the champagne and post the video.  Until then keep your fingers crossed.