🧠 5 Visuals for Your Next Video

Author

Rickie Ho
November 30, 2023

Happy Thursday everyone,

A new format this week. This is actually how I envisioned the newsletter looking, more or less. As you know, I started this newsletter because I found myself looking for visual/animation inspiration from popular creators but with the amount of uploads on YouTube, it was impossible to keep up.

This would’ve been really helpful when I was starting out. I used to sit at my desk for hours trying to come up with ideas for a visual which took up valuable editing time. Hopefully, I can help you out with ideas to allow you more time to actually edit and animate!

Again, this newsletter is going to continue to evolve but I’m glad that you’re sticking with me through the growing pains!

Enjoy today’s edition!

- Rickie

5 Visuals I Loved This Week

1. This Simple Scatter Plot

Data visualization in video form is something that I believe isn’t being leveraged enough on YouTube. When done well, they bring life to your standard, boring screenshot of a chart. The way you choose to bring in the data, the colors you use, delaying certain data points from coming in until later; these are all things that the animator did in the example above that leveled up this chart.

There’s a lot to like about this graphic including the beige textured background, the minimal axis labels, and especially the glow details on the red points.

Additionally, animating this in After Effects really wouldn’t take too long (solids, lines, circles, glow effect, and text. I’d ballpark ~30 min of focused work to get this done).

2. This Punchy Text Intro

Not really my style, per se, but it’s definitely an engaging intro to this video. The punchy text and the zoom in are cool, of course, but what really caught my eye was the motion tracking on the text toward the end (you see it wobble with the camera). Clearly, it was done intentionally because the text before wasn’t motion tracked. The editor took the time to add that small detail, and I think it went a long way.

Note: The one thing I would change is how it covers the creator’s face at the end. For an intro, I want to see his facial expression.

3. This Take on a Whiteboard Animation

In this clip, Ali likely took a high res picture of his desk (or a video) and used a blank page in his notebook to animate on top of. This is a really cool take on the conventional whiteboard animation which is usually either a full screen overlay done in post or a more manual, top down shot of marker-on-paper. What Ali did here was blend the two methods which allows him creative freedom but also adds his personal touch with his book peeking through the bottom-right corner.

4. This Process Map Animation

Ali Abdaal’s editing team does the clean and minimal style so well! This is a really good take on a typical process map because it uses the whole screen. I also like the use of the Camera function in After Effects here which allows for the 3D zoom effect you see.

5. This Timeline + Text Overlay

I’ve never seen text being featured in this fashion before. It comes down from the top and takes up pretty much the entire screen. It’s hard to read at first but once it’s highlighted, it becomes clear what the message actually is. I’m probably going to use this effect eventually in future videos. Something new!

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