🧠 5 Visuals for Your Next Video

Author

Rickie Ho
January 26, 2024

Happy Friday everyone,

Hope you had a productive week! Not a ton to update you on just yet, but I’ll reveal that I am working on a really cool project that I’m hoping to make public soon!

Aside from that, I won’t bore you with another long intro so let’s get right into the newsletter.

Enjoy today’s edition!

- Rickie

5 Visuals I Loved This Week

1. This Series of Visuals

Video: Why (American) football dominates//Search Party

  • I really like what Sam Ellis is doing with his new independent project.

  • Throughout the video, he has sequences where he’s literally talking about the process of animating this very video.

  • Some details I like about the TV broadcast breakdown

    • I haven’t seen time displayed like this before but this type of visual could be applied to a bunch of different use cases.

      • One example that came to mind was talking about the project management process where there are multiple different functions. Each project function could have its own brick.

    • I also love the way that the blocks move. The way that they compress and get fatter before separating and attaching back together like magnets.

  • The next visual shows a TV calendar with the different NFL games moving into different boxes representing days of the week.

    • All his videos have a similar design to them which tie them all together under the “Search Party” brand.

      • This is why I included the full-screen news article visual because he took the headlines and re-branded them for his own video.

    • This is a super simple-looking visual and probably has less use cases compared to the one before but I loved the look of it.

      • I’ll keep this animation in my back pocket and if I ever end up making something like it, I’ll include it in a future edition.

2. This Map + Title Intro Sequence

  • Vox always finds itself in my newsletter but when you’re the gold standard of animation within explainer type content, that’s not really much of a surprise.

  • Some small things that I enjoyed about this video:

    • The pop of color in an otherwise sepia-graded video. This effect looked really cool and definitely stood out when compared to the rest of the video.

    • Vox is always on top of their game when it comes to video titles cards and it’s the details that make it look so good.

      • The transitions, the background slowly moving across the screen, the textured overlay, even the little lines and the faint highlight effect on the text. Love what they do.

3. This 3D Map + Desk Visual

Video: The Logistics of Firefighting//Wendover Productions

  • This edition seems to feature a lot of faceless YouTube content but when you don’t have A-roll to act as a crutch, every visual becomes so much more important.

  • This type of faceless-style explainer is extremely tedious to edit because of the amount of B-roll you have to source on top of the animation.

  • The visuals I included above, I felt were really cool because they keep on coming back throughout the video.

    • When I think of making visuals for a video, I usually don’t think of making one foundational animation and return back to it as the video progresses but this kind of thinking could save a lot of time because you only have to make this one main visual.

    • The outline of the video can just be going through the main visual that you’ve created and it’s less tedious than spending a ton of time on an animation you’ll only use once.

4. This Red String Mind Map

  • I honestly can’t tell if this mind map visual is something made in post or if the creator actually physically made it.

    • It’s kind of in an in between zone of realism for me where it’s actually very difficult to discern between physically real or 3D rendered.

  • The beauty of this visual is that you could make this on a flat surface in After Effects and get a similar look using the camera feature to navigate it.

5. These Callout Animations

  • Business Insider really seems to like this callout animation. So much so that they reuse the exact same animation at another point in the video.

  • I’m a fan of this because of how simple it is. You can easily level up a piece of boring B-roll by adding this on it which just goes to show that you don’t need to be the best animator there is to make visually engaging videos

X to Inspire

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