🧠 5 Visuals for Your Next Video

Happy Friday everyone,

I just filmed my second video for my show AI: In The Loop. If you haven’t seen my first video, I’ll link it here. 

I learned pretty quickly in my short career as a creator that I hate filming. It’s one of the things that I actually really do not enjoy about being on YouTube. I know it has to be done though - there’s not really any way around it. So to help, I bought a teleprompter (and a box light, for those who said my video was too dark) to make the whole filming process more enjoyable. Spoiler alert: it made the recording session a lot smoother.

As for the lighting, I kinda messed up my camera settings when filming so it’s not perfect but I’d rather just start editing the video instead of re-shooting lines for another hour.

I’m really excited about how this video is going to turn out so I’m trying to have it out for you to watch ASAP.

In other news, I think I’ve figured out a schedule that allows me to be productive and get out of the house more. I’ve split up my weeks into heavy editing days and heavy writing/creativity days. So my schedule winds up being:

• Mon/Tues/Wed: Heavy editing that needs to be done in my home office with my 2 4K monitors to maximize productivity.

• Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun: Heavy writing deep work sessions that don’t require me to have as much screen real estate. These are often at a cafe that isn’t too far from me.

I considered renting shared office space but instead of like 2-3 hundred a month for a shared office, I pay like $6 for a flat white and get thousands of dollars worth of deep work done.

Enjoy today’s edition!

- Rickie

5 Visuals I Loved This Week

1. This Series of Clips That Look Like They Were Shot on Film

Video: How Capitalism Changed the Face of War//Johnny Harris

• Johnny Harris is no stranger to cinematography on his channel - he often includes beautifully shot scenes that help him tell the story he’s about to tell.

• The aspect ratio that he’s using in these clips give the video a film-feel.

  • Paired with the color-grading, the aging of the pages and the book, the manual tools used to underline in the book.

  • These all transport us back in time to where Johnny Harris wants us to be to fully understand the story.

• It’s an immersive lens that frames the entire video, which is why he maintained this aspect ratio for the majority of the video.

• YouTuber’s are storytellers and the end of the day and while this video could be made with just him sitting at a desk (or not even on the screen at all), he chose to include these shots because they allow him to tell the story the way he wants it told.

• At the end of the day, it’s still a talking head video but if you give the whole video a watch, you’ll see that the extra shots of him reading, pacing, etc, all do their job to push the story along.

  • They’re used to convey how difficult it was to procure the information required to make the video.

2. This Profile + Pie Chart

Video: We’re already using AI more than we realize//Vox

• Starting off, I like this manner of introducing a new character in the explainer.

  • Valuable piece of knowledge —> who they are

• Doing the intro in this manner isolates what the interviewee is saying without distracting the viewer with their credentials.

• I also really liked how the whole pie chart bit is put together.

  • It’s the dynamic movement of the text (with the way that ‘think’ is blown up to emphasize that that was the word of focus for the entire data visualization)

• I also liked that pie chart 1 became the base for pie chart 2, which then became the base for pie chart 3.

  • This demonstrates proper planning of how the visuals and the script would tie together.

3. These Webpage Graphics + This Pie Chart

Video: Space trash lasers, explained//Vox

• I’m always a fan of creative and dynamic ways to display information.

• The way the video is designed visually is that it’s as if someone is showing you their research through all the different tabs and windows they had open.

  • Think back to the last time you had to research a topic and had a million tabs open.

• While it may look easy, these are all assets that had to be custom made for this video.

  • Think about the desktop icons in the top left, the background, the Mac window controls, even the arrows and the refresh button.

• I decided to include the pie chart animation not necessarily for how it looks but more-so its use of color to convey a message.

  • I learned my data visualization framework from a Harvard Business Review book called Good Charts (definitely recommend if your job involves you telling stories with data).

    • If you don’t want to buy the book, here’s an article written by the author.

  • In the book, a huge component is how to use different colors to make the message you want to convey as clear as possible.

    • But it’s not just colors (like red or green), it’s experimenting with saturation, pairing like-data with like-colors.

4. This Quote Visual

Video: The Battle for Central Park//Hoog

• These kinds of text-based visuals always have a spot in my newsletter because of how applicable they are to a wide variety of videos.

• This quote visual in particular stood out to me because I’ve never seen anything really like it.

• While it may look simple - I mean it’s literally orange text on a black background - I imagine that under the hood, it’s actually quite complex.

  • For starters, you have the texturing on the text itself. It’s gives the visual a ‘soft-glow’ effect that is persistent throughout the entire video.

  • Next, it’s the glow effect that tracks the text as it’s being read. A detail to pay attention to with this is how the glow effect is isolated to the line at hand.

    • This means that each line is its own asset. Not a groundbreaking concept, but it’s a detail you could easily miss when replicating something like this.

5. These Title Cards

Video: The Dirty Business Behind Caffeine//fern

• Title cards can be super complex like the Vox AI one from last week, or they can be really simple like this one about coffee.

• In high output niche’s where you want to upload 2-3 times a week, this is a title card that is more than acceptable.

  • It still pushes the story along and communicates the message of what’s to come next.

• Some details to take note of is the gaussian blur that helps aid the transition from the corner visuals to the text in the middle.

  • I would probably make the zoom a little more pronounced but it still does its job!

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