ryanbaier.com

I came to Rally in early 2013 as a freelancer working with their marketing team. After a few months I was brought on full-time and worked as the in-house marketing video artist, using my expertise to provide video to Rally campaigns, conferences, and their YouTube channel. One memorable campaign was spearheaded by Jenny Slade to market the concept of Big Room Planning within Rally itself. DSLR cameras had recently become viable for smaller video production, so it gave me a chance to put some mileage on our new Panasonic GH4 and supporting equipment. I shot interviews and b-roll throughout the two days of planning, edited the video in Premiere, and created lower thirds and title cards in After Effects.

After some time in marketing Nate Copt, the Director of User Learning, asked me to move to his team, which was basically Rally’s documentation team. Working with User Learning gave me a chance to switch from marketing work with a goal of conversions and subscriptions to more of a focus on education and training. While this was happening, Rally was acquired by CA Technologies which then took me to a position of providing video guidance for CA documentation as a whole. A team of writers enthusiastic about video was assembled and part of my job was to provide tools, guidance and expertise to help push video as a learning tool within CA’s products. As this team of writers had limited resources, limited budget, and limited professional video experience, we had to re-think the best ways to enable the team to create high quality videos for education and documentation. This led to the team adopting Camtasia as their video tool of choice since we found it struck a good balance of user friendliness and quality. At this point I created motion graphics templates for writers to use in Camtasia as well as tutorials to train them in the use of Camtasia on Windows and Mac.

When I first started at Rally they had just acquired a Finnish team chat tool called Flowdock. I actually still prefer features in Flowdock to features in Slack (I’m looking at you threaded conversations). Years later Flowdock’s development was moved to Boulder and the product went through a rebranding. Tania McCormack was the Product Owner and a Designer on Flowdock and she made the case for Flowdock needing a new video demonstrating its features and using the new look. I created the video in After Effects leaning heavily on Trapcode Mir for the ribbon effect. The video gave me a fun opportunity to work on a product with a new, bright look.

Part of Rally’s software development process was to hold quarterly hackathons where developers would spend a week working on whatever project they would choose. It could be anything from developing a method of tracking the building elevators, to adding new functionality to the product to building an arcade machine. Product Owner Jen Durkin asked me to help with her hackathon project involving gamification and Rally’s unofficial mascot Yeti Betty. Even though it had to be done in a week I really wanted to use my hackathon time to create some 8-bit video game motion graphics and animation. Everyone on my hackathon team worked on their features, recorded a demo video, and sent that off to me to assemble into the finished video. It turned out to be a ton of fun to work on, and really pushed me to be quick and efficient. Eventually CA itself was acquired by Broadcom which brought Rally and CA’s in-house video team to an end and eventually my tenure at the company as well.