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The Explainer Video With Four Jobs

How one video helped announce, explain, demo and advertise a product and its new pricing

Explainer, Demo, Showcase, Announcement Video
Collage of frames from the final explainer video: 'Communicating project status and timelines can be challenging', Excel import, and a project timeline email
Collage of the production pipeline: creative brief, storyboard sketches with VO script, animation rig, and sound design timeline

Office Timeline & RomSoft

Office Timeline and their strategic partners at RomSoft had been due for a new explainer video for a while. When a new pricing structure was being prepared for release, it created the perfect opportunity to build a video that would solve a multitude of needs, like announcing the new price packages, explaining the concept of the product, demoing it, and working as a paid ad.

We helped by creating a clear, 1-minute-long video, crafted specifically to get the attention of their project management focused customers no matter the use case, as well as four shorter cut-downs for specific marketing uses such as short ads, or page embeds.

The Services

  • Motion Graphics & Animation Production

The Deliverables

  • Main, 1-minute long product demo/explainer video
  • 4 short cut downs
Office Timeline Expert, Plus and Lite pricing tiers

The Impact

~5,350,000

paid views during the first year of its release

17,800+

organic views during the first year of its release

94%

average watch percentage

After seeing this kind of performance during the first couple of months, Office Timeline decided to embed it on their homepage.

Before

After

The Process

Building the Video Around the Audience

Before we started animating, we made sure we understood who's going to watch the video and what they already think and feel about the topic. That meant starting from the world of project managers: the bland spreadsheets, the status update emails, and the easily triggered flood of confused stakeholder messages, the things that will feel all too familiar for them.

Blurred comment thread with replies to 'RE: Updated project timeline'

Two Versions for One Clear Vision

When a client hasn't fully defined what they want yet, the fastest way to get to clarity is to put something tangible in front of them, so we wrote a first version that was deliberately broad and longer than the final needed to be. The moment the folks at Office Timeline saw it, the conversation turned from "what do we want" to "this works, that doesn't", making V2 into a focused refinement that got approved immediately.

V1 and V2 script documents side by side, comparing broad first draft to focused final version
Blurred document titled 'General Office Timeline visual direction': clean, professional, modern

Visual Targeting

Our final strategic challenge was arguably the hardest: getting the visual direction right. The video had to feel familiar to the Microsoft users Office Timeline was speaking to without blending in completely, so we landed on leading with thorough structure rather than superficial style: a clean, UI-adjacent design that felt professional and modern, yet still distinctly Office Timeline.

Standard Procedures

It was smooth sailing from then on, the project going without a hitch through the whole production pipeline of visual designing, animating and sound design.

Animated wireframe rig with bezier motion curves and control points
Close-up of a green video editing timeline

The Outcome

What came out of production was a clear and compelling video that was 1 minute 14 seconds long, opening on the problem, moving through the demo, the key benefits, and the three pricing tiers, before directing viewers to try the product out.

Because the script was built in clearly defined parts from the start, it was also easy to cut it into four shorter versions for more targeted marketing uses.

Office Timeline Expert screen showing 'Found 9 Changes in Project Data' next to a Gantt chart
Blurred collage of colorful project roadmaps and Gantt charts

What Doesn't Show Up in the Final Cut

This project is a good example of what becomes possible thanks to a longer working relationship. We could start from real understanding of both the product and the audience, and build something thoroughly designed to work from the first frame to the last.

Excel, MS Project, Jira and Smartsheet integration icons
Blurred collage of colorful project roadmaps and Gantt charts
format_quote
"What sets Tudor from INX Films apart is not just his technical skills, but his holistic approach to the entire process. I am so in awe of his ability to capture the essence of our product and single-handedly bring a vision to life. Thank you, Tudor, for being the beating heart of our video production efforts. Here's to many more masterpieces together!"

Nicole Jacobson

Marketing Vicepresident • Office Timeline

"Tudor has a rare ability to take something that feels complicated and solve it efficiently, like building a steady, high-quality video capability without turning every project into a heavy lift. He audited what we had, identified what was missing, and created a production setup the team could actually use consistently. He built a practical video system around our brand, and from that point on, producing strong video content was no longer a bottleneck for us. I'd recommend Tudor to anyone who wants video that serves the business, not just content that looks good."

Eddy Malik

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer • Office Timeline

"It surprised us to find in Tudor from INX Films a video producer who understands the business needs behind a project, does user research, and handles the whole marketing side of video, not just the production itself. [...] We didn't even have to write the scripts ourselves. We could just hand off video production to Tudor and trust that he'd take care of everything, strategy included."

Diana Niculaes

Head of Content • Office Timeline

Need one video to do the job of four?

Let's chat about how we could do that!