Ava – Connecting Deaf & Hearing

Ava discovered this issue and worked tirelessly for two years to build a solution to the problem: An app that would transcribe conversations by using the participants’ smartphone microphones through speech recognition. By having multiple phones present and building voice profiles, the app is able to distinguish between voices and create a chat bubble-like transcription of the conversation. The deaf person can easily read along and contribute to the conversation by typing and using text to speech – all within Ava.

Category

Commercial

Client

Ava

Country

USA

Runtime

2:18 min

Date

2016

Ava, a technology startup based out of San Francisco, was faced with a daunting task: Launching their first product – an app-based software that would connect the deaf and hearing worlds.

After considering major production companies who specialized in launching products, Ava's leadership decided instead to work with Prodigium Pictures because of our expertise in social impact entertainment. The launch video we created for Ava ended up going viral, garnering 1 Million views within 3 days.

Visit Ava

Launching 1 Million Views and 30,000 Downloads in 3 Days

Hours

Downloaded

30K

Views

Shares on Facebook

23K

Likes

Comments

Case Study

Ava in a Nutshell

5% of the world’s population is deaf or hard of hearing – a largely ignored and marginalized community of 300 million people that have to face the daily challenge of accessibility. The setting that alienates people with hearing impairments most is the group conversation with hearing people: While group conversations in sign language are not a problem, trying to read many lips simultaneously is a close to impossible task.

Ava discovered this issue and worked tirelessly for two years to build a solution to the problem: an app that would transcribe conversations by using the participants’ smartphone microphones through speech recognition. By having multiple phones present and building voice profiles, the app is able to distinguish between voices and create a chat bubble-like transcription of the conversation. This allows deaf users to easily read along and contribute to the conversation by typing and using text-to-speech – all within Ava.

2 Months of R&D for the Launch Video

We were excited take on the task of helping launch Ava's app to a very proud community . From the start, it was obvious that we had to undertake some major R&D, as nobody on the Prodigium team was deaf (although one Exec. Producer, Ace Salvador, had studied at RIT, the largest school for Deaf people in the US). For this project, Prodigium did something very unusual: instead of asking for a single Ava executive to handle all internal feedback on our plans for the video, we opened the floor to Ava's entire team to contribute. We studied their company history, their customer interactions with beta versions of the app, the fragmented nature of the hearing impaired communities (distinguished as Deaf, deaf & HoH – learn more about these differences and how they affect daily life), Ava’s closest competitors and built case studies of similar social business app launches.

We were excited to take on this task of helping launch the app to a very proud community. It was obvious that major R&D had to be undertaken in order to do the launch video justice – nobody on the Prodigium team was deaf, only Exec. Producer Ace Salvador had studied at RIT, the largest school for Deaf people in the US. Prodigium did something very unusual: Instead of asking for a single Executive from Ava to handle all internal feedback, we opened the floor to the entire team of Ava to contribute information. We studied their company history, their customer interactions with beta versions, the fragmented nature of the hearing impaired communities (distinguished as Deaf, deaf & HoH – learn more about these differences and how they affect daily life), Ava’s closest competitors and built case studies of similar social business app launches.

Our R&D resulted in more than 100 pages of synchronized research documents that would iteratively go back and forth between the Ava team and Prodigium’s development group in real time. We narrowed down the launch video to a 2-3 minute prompt, pitched 6 concepts and iterated 8 times until we arrived at our final script. The script showcased real scenarios that many beta-testers of Ava shared and would be very familiar to the deaf community. Ava CEO Thibault Duchemin and Prodigium’s co-founder and director/writer Tobias Deml closely worked together on shaping a well-told story that would be accessible both to hearing allies and the deaf community.

Authenticity as a Key Decision Driver

When it came to casting, we had two criteria that we enforced throughout: authenticity and representation. We wanted to cast real deaf and Hard of Hearing actors, and we wanted to represent gender and ethnicity fairly in front and behind the camera.

Casting non-hearing actors proved to be a real challenge, but after 2 weeks of casting, we found Janel Schmidt, a deaf actress, and Mando Garza, a Hard of Hearing actor, in Los Angeles. Continuing our drive for authenticity, we rewrote the script to more closely reflect their real lives, even casting Jordan Despanie, a real-life USC PhD candidate in virology, as an undergrad instructor. Filming took place in real classrooms, real doctor’s offices, real living rooms, and real light rail stations – we wanted this launch video to have documentarian authenticity combined with artistic visuals.

Post Production

Prodigium iterated on every step along the way with Ava; this time, the input was streamlined on the client side in order to guarantee one cohesive final result.

We also gave the post production a unique spin: our first two iterations had absolutely no sound – they were silent, with subtitles. The main reason being that our main target audience was the Deaf, deaf & Hard of Hearing communities, and we had to assume that they wouldn’t hear the audio. Secondly, viewership for videos distributed on a Facebook timeline always increases when the video works just as well without sound as it does with audio.

Prodigium’s post producer Hiroki Kamada supervised the composition of original music, the creation of soundscapes, and the "simulated deafness" in the sound design.

Prodigium iterated on every step along the way with Ava; this time, the input was streamlined on the client side in order to guarantee one cohesive final result.

We gave the post production a unique spin: Our first two iterations had absolutely no sound – they were silent, with subtitles. The reason being that our main target audience was the Deaf, deaf & Hard of Hearing communities, and we had to assume that they wouldn’t hear the video. Secondly, the distribution on a Facebook timeline always increases in viewership when the video works just as well without sound as it does with audio.

Prodigium’s post producer Hiroki Kamada supervised the composing of original music, the vast creation of soundscapes and the simulated deafness in sound design.

Release and Virality

We decided that a Facebook video release was the best approach – particularly for understanding spread and viewership – and Ava was able to secure a publishing placement on ProductHunt, a popular app curation site. ProductHunt’s facebook page often shared app launches via video, with an average of 15 likes per post. Our video for Ava raised the bar exponentially: within 72 hours of posting, the video was shared 23,000 times on Facebook, garnering a combined 70,000 likes and 1M views.

Marketing dollars spent for promoting the video: $0.

ProductHunt had never seen such a massive response to a video launch in its history.

This extraordinary performance – thousands of times more successful than all other ProductHunt featured videos – was also reflected in the downloading and customer demand metrics: the Ava app was downloaded 30,000 times within 3 days, and the Ava team had to hire seven additional customer support staff in order to deal with the wave of demand. The Facebook post has since been watched over of 1.8 Million times and been shared by over 37,000 people on the social network.

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