Participate in Our Mini Contest This Week – Make a Screencast

Participate in Our Mini Contest This Week – Make a Screencast

It took a little while for us to announce the contest winners from last week’s Twilio + Twitter mashup challenge.  So this week, instead of picking a category of applications and leaving you with just over 72 hours to write up the code, we’re giving this week’s contest a twist.

If you’ve been reading our blog and surfing our website, you might have noticed that we’re hard at work producing screencasts and videos as another way to explain new Twilio features and demonstrate applications.  But why should we have all the fun?

So now it’s your turn.  You have until 11:59pm this Sunday, January 31st, to submit your video demonstrating how to build a Twilio app.  The only rules are that it must be uploaded on a publicly accessible website, and it must be no longer than 3 minutes.

Tips for a Good Screencast

I recently gave a 5 minute Ignite talk at Wordcamp Boston about the art of making great screencasts.  If you want to watch the video, it is embedded below, but here are the main points:

• pick a topic that can fit in 3 minutes
• draw a storyboard
• do a dry run
• go for continuous takes that don’t require editing
• add voice overs
• distribute online for free (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)