Make your content scroll-stoppingly good.
Creative insights from an animator who's built a career on social media.
My holiday money-makers
Ever wonder how creative ideas evolve into something that pays dividends years later? Here's the story behind my most successful holiday videos: 50 Ways to Open a Gift (9M views) and 50 Ways to Wrap a Gift (2.9M views). I made them in 2018, and even after 6 years, they still make a few thousand dollars every holiday season as they spike in viewership throughout December. They're very evergreen in the sense that a lot of views return to them every Christmas. (Admittedly, I find it really...
How I pitch to brands
I spent November working with Sony to produce this magical transition video featuring their products. I thought it'd be fun to show the initial pitch I presented so you can compare it to the final video. I find that taking pictures of myself is the easiest, most efficient, and clearest way of communicating my ideas. If I can make the idea work like this, then I have a lot of confidence it'll work in video. And it's also really understandable from the client side (need to make sure the...
This video will be a hit
I typically stick to reflecting on past videos, but today I'm going to make a bold prediction that what I'm currently working on will be a hit. I'm locking in this prediction as a way to put my money where my mouth is before the video is even made. I previously wrote about a simple formula for shareability (the dinner table test): did you see that video where [blank] does [blank]? This is one of those awesome ideas that neatly fits into that formula. Family and friends have been asking what...
What's your toothache?
I recently read The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World by Bruce Feiler. Among hundreds of interviews with people who had taken unconventional paths to career fulfillment, the author found that one of the most direct ways of determining someone's passion as an adult was: What was your toothache as a child? The term is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's story Aunty Toothache, where a boy suffers an excruciating toothache at the cost of his talent for writing great poetry....
Beginner's Guide to Stop-Motion Animation
While I'm knee-deep in production on a new brand partnership, I wanted to share a guide I've just made live on my site: the Beginner's Guide to Stop-Motion Animation. I've found that newcomers to stop-motion (and their parents) are often confused by the initial steps of getting started, so I've made it easier by listing learning resources and product recommendations. I'll definitely be adding more over time, but it's off to a good start. And if you dig that handmade, wiggly clay font in the...
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...
Creative insights from an animator who's built a career on social media.