At Descript, we use Descript every day, for all sorts of video—sharing info, presentations, reporting on research, quick messages, and of course all of our marketing video. We kind of have to, but we also routinely find that video is just a superior way to communicate—and Descript makes it easy. Here's an example.

Alessandra Wilke is a product marketing manager at Descript, which means, among other things, that she creates and leads marketing campaigns, which starts with market research. When the research is done, she shares her findings with the rest of us on the team.

To share her research on avatars, she made an avatar video, naturally. We talked to her about why video, why avatars, and what she found most useful in her Descript workflow.

‎Why use video for reporting on your avatar research?

A written doc, it just kind of tends to get put on the back burner. But a video, something really easy someone can just watch really quickly (they can watch it at like 4x speed if they need to), I think it's just a better way to engage with people in general.

Why is quality important?

If I'm sharing a video with colleagues, I want it to look good. I want it to look like I put thought and effort into it. I want it to come across like I'm a thoughtful, trustworthy, hardworking human being, and so I never would've considered creating a video to share out with colleagues unless I had Descript to make it look really good, really quickly.

Your video opened with some humor. Don't see that very often in a doc.

I'm not gonna joke in a doc because you can't really see how it comes across. You can't really have tone in a written doc. With a video, you can create a tone by having a certain kind of avatar and having a certain kind of voice for that avatar. And so it's easier to make jokes, to make it fun and make it more entertaining.

Why use an avatar?

I don't love to be on camera. I'm an introvert. I work from home, so sometimes my hair's in a ponytail or I'm just wearing a sweatshirt or whatever. So it's really nice to have avatars to not have the pressure of being on camera. And I can still share information with my colleagues in a professional way without being on camera and feeling that pressure of, what do I look like? Am I sounding okay? Do I need to rerecord? All of that really goes away when I use an avatar—and that makes it easier for me to be focused on the content and on the actual information that I'm getting across rather than, oh no, do I look weird in this lighting?

Why did you decide to use your own voice, but not your own avatar?

It's nice to have me presenting my work. My voice, I don't mind actually. Like, I prefer not having my face on the video, but I really did like that I could present it in my voice. I don't know why. That was just something that felt right to me.

What other Descript features came in handy?

Write mode. I wrote the script for the video right in Descript. I had a lot of research and raw interviews that I had put into ChatGPT to summarize. And so I had this summary and I wasn't sure the best way to kind of like put it all together. And I wound up doing that right in Descript and it made it really easy to figure out what to say and to discover the main points I wanted to get across.

Would you still have made a video if you didn’t have avatars?

Without avatars, I would've been really intimidated by video and it would've taken me much longer to record. And I’d be critical of myself. Am I looking okay? Is the lighting okay? Especially with glasses, you know, sometimes there's stuff that reflects off of them. So there's all these different things about recording that make it really stressful, especially when I want my audience to consider it a good video. So it was really nice to have avatars there so I could just plug one in and not have to worry about any of the recording and really just make sure that the content of the video was great and well spoken.