🧠 5 Visuals for Your Next Video

Happy Friday everyone,

Long time no see. The past few weeks, I’ve been nose deep into new projects and new work and it’s taught me a really interesting lesson.

Recently, I’ve been at the starting point of a bunch of different projects and I’m learning that you CAN in fact have it all, just not at once. You can run multiple businesses simultaneously, and go to the gym, and eat healthy, and go to the beach of weekends - but it’ll take a lot of time.

The core of what I’m trying to say is that starting new ventures is going to require A LOT of attention and if you’re going to start 3-4 things simultaneously, you’re going to neglect certain ventures for other ones - there’s only 24 hours in a day. And in my case, the newsletter has taken a backseat to my editing business and scripting my own content.

When I started editing for Humphrey, editing lower quality videos used to take me 6-7 full days of editing. Now, my process is down to about 2 days (although I don’t like working 12-14 hour days so I stretch it out over longer). All the effort is concentrated at the beginning but over time, you begin to get more efficient and can then take on the task of starting something new all over again.

You can bet I’ll be coming out with a more in depth video on this exact topic.

I’m still going to try my best to show up every week but if I can’t, just know it’s not because I’m lazy!

Enjoy today’s edition!

- Rickie

5 Visuals I Loved This Week

1. Using Zoom to Tell a Story Using Data

Video: Why does this forest look like a fingerprint?//Vox

• I’d consider myself a data storyteller but one thing that I always struggled to do was manipulate scale and zoom to tell the story better.

  • I never really liked zooming in so much you could not see the axis or title anymore.

  • Maybe consider me a purist but I felt that the axis and titles were necessary to tell the full story of a graph.

• Lately, I’ve been experimenting with perspective within my charts and I’ve realized a couple of things:

  • While it’s necessary to show axis and titles at the start (or else we would have no idea what kind of data we’re looking at), it’s actually better data storytelling to zoom into the key areas of the chart when brought up.

  • You probably learned all the elements of what goes into a good chart in elementary school, but all that practice was done with paper and pencil.

    • Video allows for much more flexibility with chart elements - layer in the animations, strategically play with the axis, manipulate opacity - all to tell a good story with the data.

2. This Text/Title Effect

Video: Cleo Abram x Large Language Models//Google

• I’m always looking for simple but visually appealing ways to display text and this effect where “human imagination” moves downward to make room for the “journalist x LLM” text is exactly that.

• Nothing much else for me to say here other than I love going to Google’s YouTube channel for motion design inspiration.

• I actually used a design element from one of Google’s keynote presentations recently.

3. This Dynamic Timeline Visual

Video: Apple - The House that Tim Cook Built//fpt.

• Love the mask effect here blending with the rotation and slow zoom-out.

• If you want to achieve something like this, shoot in 4K and just shoot the wide angle.

  • In post, you can mask the timeline onto the screen and use null objects in After Effects to give you that slow zoom and rotation without needing to adjust the mask in real time.

4. This Collage Animation

Video: The Algebra of Wealth//Scott Galloway

• Huge fan of the stop motion/collage effect Scott Galloway has going on here!

• Side note: I think the light blue/teal goes so well with an orange-y yellow. Kind of like the LA Chargers colors. I use this combination all the time.

5. This Timeline Screen Effect

Video: How Private Equity Consumed America//Wendover Productions

• I like the concept here with the timeline and the screen effect for the images.

• I’m not as big of a fan of the actual execution though because I feel like the timeline itself is just too small. It looks a little too “content-factory”-esque like all the other faceless YouTube documentary channels out there.

  • PS: I know Wendover is THE faceless documentary channel but I feel like I’ve seen better edited videos from them in the past.

X to Inspire

• Love this quote! If you’re an avid reader of the newsletter and want to connect, feel free to DM me on Twitter or Instagram!

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