Make your content scroll-stoppingly good.
Weekly insights from a content creator with 9M followers making ads for the world's largest brands.
The Power of Compilations
In the summer of 2021, I was a new father with a two-month-old baby. With zero time to produce videos, I lazily compiled some recent clips of me magically turning into objects and posted it online. Individually, the clips did okay - a few million views across all of them. But something big happened when I grouped them together - 250k retweets, hundreds of millions of views, and national news appearances. As someone who specializes in 5-second attention-grabbing clips, it's super important to...
Stop overthinking your content
When I share my behind-the-scenes clips, I typically produce a script, storyboard, record narration, animate motion graphics - more of a how-to, short lecture approach that takes quite a bit of work. But my pal Caleb Natale, an incredibly talented VFX artist, has recently been posting the raw footage from his effects shoots (below) to wildly successful results. On YouTube Shorts, he's seeing tens of millions of views on each post. What I find SUPER interesting is that this style of...
This ad gets 250k views per day
I previously wrote about my favorite way to do brand deals - this includes a main, ad spend video backed up by some type of behind-the-scenes. Three years ago, I took this approach while working with Mattel to promote their show Thomas & Friends. The primary video is a trick where I magically pull a toy Thomas train out of my TV and then throw it into a storybook. I think it works particularly well because it features various magic tricks, a clip from the show, and several physical products...
My New Content Strategy
Long story short, bigger monthly pieces. (Over the past month, my schedule has been jam-packed making ad content for Google's Pixel 9 Pro to run on TikTok, as well as a campaign for Patreon) I don't know if it's exhaustion from nearly a decade of posting short videos, the ebb and flow of being an artist, or just something in the air, but I'm really motivated to give more time to bigger videos. Rather than freely churn out scroll-stopping, 5-second clips, my plan moving forward is to spend...
Formulas for Effective Advertising
I just released this video for a new Patreon campaign. Rather than producing a quick VFX trick or animation, I decided to reveal a bit more of myself and bring some artistic vulnerability to the table. I'm new to this style of scripting, so I actually leaned on a formula that I stumbled upon a few months back - one that's often used for emotional ads produced by companies like Nike. It's a 'U shape', meaning that the first half features a problem, pivots on a BUT, and then the last half...
Further Insight from the Caption Test
I recently wrote about a simple caption test and its positive results - largely that it boosted authentic engagement in a really honest way. It's been a month since I posted that video, and I've noticed that the initial momentum has kept up and lead to a greater amount of views and comments. Which is surprising! It's honestly a really simple trick, yet it's now my most viewed TikTok for the year and has outperformed most of the typical videos on my Facebook page. Interestingly, those are the...
Improve in 5 Seconds a Day
For the past two months or so, I've been creating what I call a weekly '5x5 vlog'. It's where I film a 5 second video of something I'm doing each day Monday through Friday. Sounds simple, but the kicker is that I assign a theme. The example I included required that I have a horizontal line running through the center of the frame. The results aren't extraordinary, but what I've found happens is that I'm greatly pushed outside of my instincts with where the camera should be placed or how I...
Results of the caption test
Last week, I wrote about HOW videos are posted - followed by an experiment to see if the right caption or on-screen text could encourage authentic engagement. I remarked how I typically post my editing tricks with simple, descriptive captions. This time, I invited viewers to provide feedback by captioning my video 'Rate this transition'. On TikTok, I even wrote the phrase directly on the video. Some basic napkin math tells me that my average video receives roughly 30 comments per 100k views...
HOW is your video posted?
One of my advantages in the creator space, including this newsletter, is that I have an online audience of 9M+ and get to share content experiments with you. So let's try something with a new post (I'll follow up next week): I'm currently wrapping up a quick visual effects trick. I had hoped to include it today, but will need another day to finish it. So what I've decided to do is experiment with how it will be posted. I've always been fascinated with the context of how an image or video is...
When to walk away
There's a funny effect when animating stop-motion (below) where you'll be in the middle of a shot, take the weekend off, and then return on Monday morning to find that you despise all of the work you did on Friday afternoon (and then redo it). "Fresh eyes" it's called, and it's often overlooked in the creative process. Walking away is something that I typically build into my workflow these days. A lot of my visual effects editing needs to appear 'invisible', and I find it's often more...
Weekly insights from a content creator with 9M followers making ads for the world's largest brands.