Make your content scroll-stoppingly good.
Creative insights from an animator who's built a career on social media.
Little effort for an extra 5M views
(I'm going to write this post like a robot so that it's efficient and easy to follow.) The Plan Two weeks ago, I posted a compilation of 5 tricks where I'm magically vanishing. Last week, I posted 5 behind-the-scenes (BTS) edits - one for each trick. You can watch these videos in this playlist. The Execution I specifically made these BTS edits low lift, essentially reposting each trick and including some phone clips of how it was filmed (example above). It was very little additional work. I...
How I film perfect edits
I recorded a quick video explaining how I film 'perfect' edits. The trouble with filming seamless jump cuts is making sure shot A lines up exactly to shot B. My old method was filming a dozen or more takes of both sides and hoping a pair of shots lines up. Now, I use a stop-motion software called Dragonframe to import shot A to have a visual guide for lining up shot B. It saves me a ton of time in the edit - and also gives me immediate feedback of any potential problems. 👉 This week, I'm...
Magically vanishing
Well, I'm obsessed with achieving 'perfect' jump cuts. I spent the past month creating these five clips and combing through every pixel to make sure no one could spot the cut (shadows are really difficult). In previous posts, I mentioned how my new content strategy would be to create more month-long videos, as well as the apparent power of bundling clips into compilations. This is October's effort. 👉 For November, I'm going to explore the best ways to share the behind-the-scenes from these...
Distributing my own tutorials
This week: sharing videos with the right audience, not the largest one. I've always struggled with making useful tutorials for aspiring editors and animators. Sure, I often post 1-minute behind-the-scenes of my edits, but I specifically dumb those down for the sake of a general audience. The problem with making actual click-this-button tutorials is that posting them on YouTube doesn't feel like the right option. They're highly niche, so they typically get buried in the feed. They're public,...
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...
Creative insights from an animator who's built a career on social media.