We’re going to cover the basic steps you need to recreate it as well as the thought process behind figuring out how it was done. My version is the red ring that plays 2nd in the video.

If you’re looking for some new design ideas for ads, are a beginner looking for practical projects, or just want to send this to your video editor to have in their back pocket, you will have something to work with.

Also, if this kind of post is helpful to you or your editors, let me know in the comments!

Between things like this and some of the editing I’ve done for I’m asked to do this sort of thing fairly often.

Look for Flaws.

Figuring out an effect is usually a lot of experimentation, guess and test, as well as diving on forums and YouTube looking for answers.

You need to break up a final product into a process with individual steps. However, sometimes you get stuck because you can understand how they got things to a certain point, but hit a step where there is a leap you don’t know how to make.

Often the big clues to these things are in the imperfections. Sometimes this means watching frame by frame or zooming in super close.

In this case, however it’s actually pretty obvious so I didn’t have to do any of that!

Here’s what I can see right away:

1. The bracelet and background aren’t moving. This is a picture. If you want to get ambitious and mask out the background to add motion & polish you can, but you might not have to for an ad. If this was an ad for a high end brand, different story. But for the masses, the crap often performs.

2. What’s moving? The colored smoke. Notice how it doesn’t line up so well on the left side? That’s a sloppy masking job.

So you need a picture of some cheap bling and smoke. Everything else is just tweaking it to taste.

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The Basic Effect

The basic effect is going to just be adding colored smoke over an image and masking out parts where we don’t want smoke. Whats the best way to add smoke? Get some footage of smoke on a green screen or black background and key it out. If you want to know more about keying in general, see this guide.

I went and grabbed an image of a ring on a dark background and some stock green screen smoke to start.

Drop the picture of the jewelry onto a layer in Premiere and the green screen smoke on a layer above it, then add the Ultra Key effect to the smoke layer. Set the key color to the green in the footage using the pen tool.

The green pixels should now be transparent.

The smoke position and size can be adjusted as needed. I chose a circular smoke puff, but depending on your starting image you may want to try something else. The reference image appeared to have a vertical haze rising upward. Your call on what makes sense.

Match Color

Next challenge is matching color of the smoke to the color of the jewel.

Add the Color Replace effect to your smoke. Set the target color to the smoke and the Replace color to what you want to match.

Turn up the Similarity control to make sure the smoke fills out the smoke. Remember, the smoke will not be one uniform color of grey, so you want to color match the shades of gray adjacent to the ones you picked as your target.

Before:

After:

Adjust blending modes

Now you’re going to mess with the blending modes and Opacity to taste on the smoke layer. I liked Color Dodge at 100% personally, but Normal at around 50% Opacity was also not bad.

Masking

To reduce the hard edges of the smoke and make it feel more like it is originating from the gem, you may want to adjust the size and also mask out the edges.

Click the oval icon and use the handles on the blue circle to place the mask. You’ll also want to adjust the mask expansion and Opacity until it is blending well, but more importantly adjust the Mask Feather control so you lose the hard edge of the mask and help it blend into the background.

For oddly shaped objects, you’d need to draw the mask by hand with the pen tool. This doesn’t have to be perfect if you’re going to be feathering the edge anyway. Hard edges will require that level of precision.

Don’t be afraid to swap out the smoke too! This is why I have a hard drive full of random footage like this and why people pay for stock footage libraries. Sometimes an asset just isn’t working, so it helps to have variations of the same thing.

Next, I thought it would be more interesting if the gem had some kind of motion going on.

You could use a glow or lens flare for this or a zillion other things. I chose to use some footage of fire to add a hint of motion.

To blend the fire with the gem, you can use the exact same trick as the smoke. Place the fire footage on a layer over the jewelry and use an Opacity mask directly over the gem so it only appears in that place.

Then, I changed the Blending Mode to Luminosity

I also Keyframed the Opacity of the fire layer to move up and down between about 25% and 50% to give the gem a faux-glow effect. You could also grab footage of some glowing light instead and probably get a similar result.

Final Touch- Texture

If you’re really ambitious with this kind of thing, you could mask around the ring and completely replace the background with something moving.

A quicker solution is to layer in some kind of texture. In this case I reduced the Opacity of the ring and under it, added a layer with some footage of dusk particles and smoke embers to add some subtle motion. To make it blend with the grey background, I simply use the Fast Color Corrector and desaturated it completely. Done.

This texture trick is one of those little things that you never notice until someone points it out and then you see it everywhere.

Overall, fairly simply effect but worth your time to learn to do or make sure your video editor can do.

Next up will be a more After Effects heavy edit so stay tuned.

You want to show people how to do things. I can think of two big categories here:

1. It will help grow your non-anon business

2. You want to make training videos for internal use with your employees and VAs

In either case, you are going to need to capture your screen and potentially your web cam and audio voiceover so you can explain to people how to do things.

You also ideally want this to be basically a push button process. Its easy to procrastinate when there is a bunch of technical fuss that needs to happen before you can do anything.

Why I’m Migrating Away From Screenflow

I used to use and recommend a paid software tool called Screenflow for this purpose.

It still has some nice features like pointer callouts, but it tends to freeze when I’m making very long videos, the export renderer moves at the speed of smell, as well as lacks a batching function. If you don’t mind this and just want something thats friendly to use with an iMovie-like interface, this still might be a good option, but personally I needed more.

Other bummer, is it is Mac only.

The Software You Can Use Instead

Screenflow combines screen capture functionality with a basic editor.

Instead, you can use OBS and the editor of your choice like Adobe Premiere (paid) or Davinci Resolve (free or paid) which are better suited for that task anyway. The other benefit is this opens up a Linux-based workflow with OBS + Resolve.

OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software.

OBS is free, open source software.

If you want to check out the code or contribute, the OBS Github is here and you can also support the project financially on Patreon.

OBS is more known among people who do a lot of livestreaming, which it is very capable of! You can have different scenes, transitions, different camera sources, and all the other core elements of a live switched stream.

But today we’re going to be setting it up to record a screen capture.

How To Set Up For Screen Cap

First, you’ll need to Download OBS. Installing on OSX or Windows is typically like any other application. If you’re on Linux I’m going to assume you know how to troubleshoot simple things like this yourself.

Open OBS and look in the lower left for the Scenes pane. Each scene can have a variety of video and audio inputs you composite together.

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Like a lot of you, I am interested in using videos to sell stuff so I’ve been busy on both YouTube and creating website content.

I’ve talked about this before here but the basic strategy is to use these two formats in a synergistic way.

1. You write an article, let it marinate and rank for a bit and assuming that goes well you come and refresh it later with a YouTube video. The article is a loose script. Maybe you add a bit more in the video and refresh the article to reflect that.

2. You can do the opposite too. Make a video, transcribe it, run that through a KW tool and then embed the video with a transcript below it.

Either way, you have a video, article content, images, and an excuse to refresh the content every now and then. So far, Google likes this approach because I’m giving it what it wants.

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Lots of spider food, content updates, quality user experience. I’m convinced the only reason more people aren’t doing this is it’s a bunch of work.

Also, YouTube people are so hyperfocused on YouTube many of them don’t even have websites or know SEO.

SEO people on the other hand tend to be scared of making video content either due to unfamiliarity with the tech, lack of creativity, or extremely introverted personalities and doing a voiceover or god forbid appearing on camera isn’t in the cards.

The Problem

I want to show related products under my blog posts instead of an email signup form. I tried to add the section with Shopify’s 2.0 page editor and was not successful. I also tried a few plugins, but they mostly sucked or wanted a monthly fee for what should be a very simple, build it once kind of feature.

Why do I want this at all?

I have a bit of traffic now and get sales.

For a while I had an email signup form below every blog article and nobody ever touched it. Getting sales and near zero email signups seems a bit backwards.

My free lead magnet products do a better job of harvesting emails than a plain signup form. So the plan going forward is to keep publishing to the site but the bottom of every post will have free lead magnet products or paid products—whichever is more relevant to the content of the article.

The Metafield Solution

Here is how I built a product gallery that lives under every blog post I publish, which hopefully helps the conversion rate of the site.

At the least, it will help to push my lead magnet products to more people so I can advertise to them with email newsletters later.

The first step is go to shopify admin > settings > custom data > metafields under metafields, click "Blog Posts"

Under the Definitions tab, create a new definition (green button). I called mine Related Products, used the auto created namespace and key, then made sure it had access to my storefront hit save. At this step it looked like this:

Now we need to do some very light coding (you can copy mine)

In Shopify admin, Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes click the ... button and choose Edit Code.

Now you should be able to see all the liquid files that power your store. Liquid is Shopify’s templating language that let’s you grab data from a store and display it on a page.

Search for the article-template.liquid file. This is the file we need to modify.

It has a bunch of liquid code that basically asks the Shopify backend for data and dumps on the page.

First I like to make sure Shopify will be doing the dumping in the correct place so I’ll typically use a simple block of text and move it around the page until it appears where I want my new feature to be.

Make a basic html tag like <h1> PRODUCTS GO HERE</h2> and cut and paste it somewhere in the page and hit save. Make sure you keep your place in the liquid file.

Open any blog post on the site and Shift + click the refresh button (to force a hard refresh) you should see your h1 PRODUCTS GO HERE text somewhere on the page.

Repeat this until you find the correct place you want your product to appear.

For me, this is just under the social share buttons that come under the article content. In your liquid file, put a comment to mark this place like this

<!-- Related Products Block -->

<h1> PRODUCTS GO HERE</h2>

Now you’re going to delete the h1 tag and substitute the following code instead:

<!-- Related Products Block -->

{%- if article.metafields.custom.related_products.value -%} {%- assign related_products = article.metafields.custom.related_products.value -%}

{%- paginate related_products by 10 -%} <div style="text-align: center;">

<h2>Related Products</h2>

</div>

<div style="display:flex; justify-content: center; flex-wrap: wrap;"> {%- for the_product in related_products -%}

{%- if the_product.available -%} <div style="max-width: 250px; padding:15px;">

<a href="{{ the_product.url }}" title="{{ the_product.title }}" style=""> <img src="{{ the_product.featured_image | img_url: '250x250', crop: 'center', format: 'pjpg' }}" alt="{{ the_product.title }}" loading="lazy"> <p>{{ the_product.title }}</p> </a>

</div>

{%- endif -%}

{%- endfor -%}

</div>

{%- endpaginate -%}

{%- endif -%}

Here is an image with better formatting so you can understand what is going on here:

In very simple terms, We’re asking Shopify if the Metafield we created for this article has any value. If it does it creates an H2 tag with the text Related Products (change this to whatever you want), then it loops through the related products while skipping anything that is out of stock.

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For each product, it spits out the product image and title and has this wrapped in a link tag to make it clickable. The block as well as the individual product links are wrapped in some <div> tags which add styling like making the products the appropriate size & centers stuff with flexbox.

Now if you Shift + click to refresh a blog post you will see…nothing! This is because you need to add some products to the metafield in that blog post.

Navigate the the blog editor for the post you already have open. You should see this at the bottom of the post:

Click on the Metafields and at the next dialog screen you will be able to click and add whatever products in your catalog are relevant to that blog post. Save and refresh and you will see those products in the gallery under your article now (or wherever you decided to place the code).

You’ll probably have to add or change the styling because the inherited CSS on your site will certainly not be the same as mine, but this should give you a decent place to start from.

If the styling is a complete disaster on your site for some reason, just clear all the style attribute tags to style=““ to see what that gets you, then modify from there. In my case my product images were way too big, nothing was centered, & there was no padding.

Better For Bigger Stores?

This probably isn’t necessary for smaller stores with only 1-5 products. But if you have a store and plan to grow the catalog or already have a lot of SKUs, this will make things more scaleable.

What I’m liking about this approach is it turns each blog post into a mini-funnel without hard selling and better calibrate it to searcher intent. This is OK for some niches but the typical customer I’m dealing with would find that too aggressive and just bounce.

Instead I can write an Informational article and include some language in the video that directs people to a free lead magnet. Then embed that product in both the metafield of the blog post and the YouTube video description.

Alternatively, for articles that fall under Shopping or Customer Investigation intent, I’ll push the stuff that costs money because they’re already a but closer to buying something anyway. The page is just there to build some trust and give them a feel for the brand.

Playback is stuttery and irratic, the timeline gets stuck, you can’t clearly see how effects are being rendered either. Some effects just crash the whole session.

Time to buy a $10,000 God mode machine? Maybe, if you want. I like fast computers as much as anybody, but this is the brute force option.

You also might be able to get around the problem by clicking a few buttons with the computer you already have.

You need to setup Proxy footage. This is just lower resolution footage you render out that’s a lighter computational lift which is linked to your original full resolution footage.

The editing timeline shows you the proxy footage as you work so you can see what is going on, then when you hit Export, it replaces that proxy footage with the full resolution footage you originally linked to and you’re good to go.

Why Low Resolution Files Can be Exciting

This will speed up your editing time!

Maybe not so much if you’re just using clips cut together, but as soon as you start adding effects, transitions, or just want to use high resolution footage on a slower machine, this will keep your computer from dragging and getting too clunky.

Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Resolve all have this capability and is one of those “pro” features that really will make your life easier, especially if you work on an older computer or need to edit footage with a laptop then want to switch back to the full resolution stuff when you’re back at the desktop machine.

This is probably the only time ever you are going to really excited about low resolution files so soak it up.

How To Do It

This is a highly Googlable thing, but I’ll walk you through it in Premiere since that’s where I’m living a lot these days (coming off a huge project that took over most of my life in June..but $$ so no complaints)

There are basically 3 simple steps.

1. Telling Premiere what you want to proxify

2. Rendering it out

3. Checking to make sure the footage is linked correctly

There’s also a toggle button that lets you flip between the regular footage and your proxies. If you have a lot of very high resolution footage, rendering it out might take a while so I’d allow some time for step 2.

Steps 1 & 2

First, go to your Project panel. If you can’t see it, you can add it from the menus

Window > Projects > yourprojectname

Now select all the footage you’ve added to the project and want to create proxies for and right click. Navigate to Proxy in the menu and hit Create Proxies.

This opens a dialog box with some codec options.

There are a couple codec options you can experiment with, but I get the best results using ProRes Medium or Low resolution formats. If you’re on a Mac this is almost certainly going to be the best option.

I don’t recommend using H.264 but if you want to try it just to see, no harm in doing so.

For the Destination, select the 2nd option to manually set it. Then hit Browse, make a new folder in the root domain of your project called “proxies” or whatever you want and hit OK.

Adobe Media Encoder will automatically render your proxies and link them to your project. This is the part that can take a while if you’re rendering out lots of footage.

How to check if your proxies are linked

Go back to the Project pane in Premiere. Each column has a bit of data about your footage like frame rate, duration, etc.

Right click on one of the columns and pick Metadata Display.

This opens another window. In the search bar of the Metaday Display window, search “proxy” and make sure the Proxy option is checked.

Back in the Project Pane, scroll over to the Proxy column and everything should say Attached that you proxified.

Also you can toggle the proxies on an off with this button (see giant red arrow below) in the video output pane. You will see a clear difference in the quality of the video, especially when zoomed in to a piece of the frame.

Once you get to this step, you should be good to go. Throw in some hungrier effects like Turbulent Displace and you will see a smoother, improved playback experience at the expense of some hard drive space and the time to render the Proxies for all your files.

Even if you don’t shoot video yourself in 4K, increasingly stock footage sites and video asset stores provide you video assets in higher resolutions whether you want it that way or not so it will help you to know how to set this up. No need to suffer through a stuttery edit.

Personally, I also prefer to download assets one time in the larger resolution rather than have to maintain duplicate copies of 4K and 1080 footage.

Why This Is Actually An Upgrade In Quality, Not Speed

The biggest complaint I hear about video editing is that it is very time consuming.

While true, workflow and setup optimizations like this help reduce the amount of time you spend fighting the machine and trying to get it to take orders like it’s supposed to. This will make you a bit faster for sure. An upgrade all of us will happily take.

While the increase in turnaround efficiency is always welcome, this is not the biggest benefit. You can optimize but at the end of the day only kick out edits so far.

The bigger win here is after a while the computer becomes like an extension of your body. Your fingers just start moving the mouse and keys without thinking. This does more than make the final file fall out the back of your computer in a shorter time interval.

This helps you access a truly creative flow state much easier. You become a lot less focused on technical crap and much more focused on what you want to happen on the screen.

Aside from flow states being tremendously beneficial to the body and mind, this opens up mental bandwidth.

You’re thinking more about the big picture of how your video is going to be recieved by the intended audience and since you’re generally moving more quickly, pursuing a spur of the moment idea has a lower time and energy cost. So what happens? You can try more shit and see if it sticks. You’re improvising more. This is a big part of developing some originality and style to your work.

Until next time.

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There are a lot of people out there with 69-84% of the pieces they need to do it and just need to fill in the gaps to become a W2 de-transitioner.

Media, Design, and Coding are all great I lean on them the most because a lot of people have these skills already.

If you don’t, you can literally learn this stuff from 0% with YouTube and Udemy tutorials for very cheap. If you throw a few months of intense learning time at it, you’ll know if you have a talent for it.

This is a big deal because if you’re not into doing sales full time, this offers another way into a 6 figure career path with no college necessary.

Ask around The Jungle as to how you’d package your knowledge and sell it as a consulting service if that’s not your thing.

If you have a valuable skill or knowledge of some industry, there has to be a way to sell it that could potentially help you quit your job, or provide a 2nd stream of income so you sleep easier at night while people are getting laid off left and right. Saying it’s not possible is simply an excuse.

I say “freelance” in quotations because of some other chatter that came up with where he managed to piss off a decent chunk of freelancer Twitter while making some very good points about how you market yourself and how that affects pricing.

Here is my original thread that inspired this.

https://twitter.com/BowTiedTamarin/status/1659209202362118146

Portfolio

The first and most important thing you need is examples of your work and if you have them, testimonials or case studies that feature results of what you helped accomplish.

I don’t have the best example of this in The Jungle right now because I’m busy as fuck well into June. Portfolio updates generally happen when things slow down and I’m looking for more to do.

What if you’re new?

You need at least one strong example of work you can synthesize on your own. This does not need to be something for a client, just don’t use a tutorial project that was spoon fed to you step by step.

Even if you’re showing off a piece you made totally for fun, if it’s representative of what you can create for others, that counts. No reason you can’t use that to sell your skills.

A client is going throw a bunch of novel challenges at you that you’re going to have to figure out solutions on your own so you need to be able to solve problems independently.

And it’s always better to show not tell them you can do this.

You'll have to grind more to get your first few clients, but remember everybody starts somewhere and this resistance is a big piece of what keeps a lot of people stuck in their day job.

For the more experienced people

Go over everything you do regularly. I call this “taking inventory”. If you’ve been doing the thing you plan to freelance in for a while, take some time to review your work from the past year or two.

One thing I’m very guilty of is doing a project, then completely forgetting it ever existed. When I do portfolio updates it always feels like I’m starting from scratch until I comb my hard drives and remember all the stuff I worked on.

I’ll often come back to something I didn’t think much of at the time and see that it stands the test of time much more than I thought it would.

Your Offer & Pricing

Before you start sending your portfolio around, you need to do some research and get a feel for what people are willing to pay for different services you offer, what you can reasonably charge, and what you do that sets you apart.

What makes you different doesn’t mean you re-invent the wheel. It can be something as simple as specializing in a certain industry. Example: You do web development, but you know exactly what lawyers need in a great website so you focus on that niche.

Make a private menu of options in a document with your various offers once your clear on what you do and who it is for (as well as who it is NOT for). These should be a few services bundled together as packages.

Some people will write out a few customer avatars to crystalize this. Detailed profiles of their ideal clients, what their needs are, pain points, budget, all that.

You also want to incorporate some flexibility to subtract services clients don’t need and look for upsell opportunities.

For example, a production company usually wants a flat day rate for me to be on-site and my upsell is charging rental fees for certain equipment like nicer lenses.

If I’m selling a video package to a brick and mortar company, a basic package would be a brand video, 1-3 explainer videos, with an option to put me on retainer and crank out 10-20 pieces of short form content per month.

As you work, I encourage you to track the amount of time you put into things closely because you’ll need to tweak your pricing structure as you go and you want to be aware of what your time is actually worth.

There’s no way you get all this right on attempt #1 so you’ll be refining this a lot as you go. Some of it depends on what opportunities come your way just by dumb luck. As you work, take note of which projects are a pain in the ass and which ones have better margins so you can go get more of them.

Know what your time is worth by the hour and put together your proposals with that in mind, but don’t directly charge people by the hour. If I’m aiming to make around $100 an hour, that isn’t the offer I make. The offer is a video package from $5-10K that reflects this.

Cold Outreach

To quote the illimitable Jungle founders BowTied Bull:

“Hate sales? Too bad.”

Lots of people think they can rely exclusively on personal network to bring in business then are rudely awakened by reality. This is a good place to get your feet wet, but it should not be your only source of leads.

Cold outreach will move the needle the fastest. Yes, you’ll do marketing and eventually start getting referrals so you have some inbound traffic to lean on, but you’ll be a lot more confident in yourself if you can bring in business by just sending some emails or phone calls.

Why selling yourself isn’t so bad, even if you hate sales

You have control over the product, branding, and get to keep all the money. And selling is part of your job, but not the whole job.

I’ve done a little corporate sales work. I was bad at it and hated every second in the office. But this was for a smile-n-dial kind of place selling a lame ‘also ran’ kind of product. And the commission structure became less interesting over time as new management started nickle and diming everybody.

I’m grateful for the experience.

That was the first place I used systems like Salesforce, learned how to obtain tricky to find emails, saw what information is worth paying for and what isn’t. And most importantly, got a lot of time talking to people.

Eventually I put together that I could just do the same things to market my own skills. I also saw the level of intensity you needed to approach it with. I was making 100-200 calls a day and not getting very far.

Ran the math. I did not need anywhere near that amount of volume to sell my own services to people and match my old paycheck. Better targeting and better offer were not hard to figure out. Went and did that. It worked.

During this period of my life, I was still pretty broke to be honest (I wasn’t selling a great service then) but this was my come to Jesus moment where I saw the light. Got me out of the W2 and opened up a huge chunk of time I could put into better things.

How to do cold outreach

You’ll hear different ways people approach it but for my work the portfolio does most of the talking and the sales process is pretty chill. Plenty of video guys don’t even have a good website, they mostly lean on a reel they send around as a YouTube link.

If I’m looking around for a new client who may need my help and find a good prospect, I just send a friendly email with examples of my work and offer to help. If I can show ways where I’d specifically improve things, that’s also helpful.

There tends to be a lot of follow up that happens because timing matters a lot.

People will often respond saying everything looks and sound great, but they’re between projects or are all covered for the moment. It’s common for them to be interested, but want to chat in a few weeks and not just be blowing me off.

Ok cool, so I just make a note to keep in touch with them and move on. Start with a basic spreadsheet of who you contacted, when, and when to follow up with any notes.

“Hard sell” tactics will do more harm than good. If you’re pushy and annoying in the first interaction, they’re not going to want to work closely with you on a production or retainer agreement that takes 3 months or more.

If you end up closing people over the phone, remember that it’s of course a sales call, but also a kind of job interview. You want to make a good impression, a strong offer, and also look out for any red flags that might make them a crappy client.

For a more concrete example, here is how I will do it when I’m ready to push my new After Effects and animated video products you’ve seen in The Jungle:

1. First I need a list of prospects.

   1. (warm) Existing contacts who don’t specialize in graphics/animation, but might be able to recommend me or hire directly. Whenever I have a new skill to show off, I like to drop a line to these people. Sometimes even as a text message for people I’m very close with.

   2. (cold) Production companies who subcontract this out or large agencies that specialize in motion or titles. Tougher to get “in” here, but the money is worth the struggle. A single win here could mean 30-50% more work for the entire year.

   3. (cold) Corporate people with content marketing jobs.

   4. Small business owners looking to grow with novel content.

2. Then I need to email around and get in touch with the right person to make sure they see my work.

3. Follow ups. I’ll probably get some trial projects at this phase, then play a lot of phone/email tag until some of my connections are ready to work with me. In the mean time I try to also follow any social channels they’re active on where I keep a presence. Instagram is usually pretty good. Lots of creatives are there and pretty visuals do well, so good odds they see my new portfolio work as I publish.

4. Contracts and scope of work. When they’re ready, there’s some discussion about creative choices, my offers, scope of work, and what the payment structure will be. Then we lock it in, collect deposit and get to work.

A lot of stuff closes completely over email.

But for larger projects, there’s usually a zoom call and a more formal pitch with a presentation, especially if I’m dealing with corporate people or small business owners. They’re steeped in a culture where they have meetings to discuss the agenda for other meetings. They can’t help sending out that calendar invite. So make sure you’re set up for this!

The video and film people are the opposite. A production company will tell you to show up at some random building in LA at 7AM and ask for Pete, then email a plane ticket and confirm my day rate. Two days later I’m sitting on a Pelican case in loading dock waiting for Pete to show up and explain what the fuck we’re doing today. There’s usually a crew call sheet floating around somewhere, but I have to ask for it a lot.

I’m sure your specialty has its own funny peculiarities like this.

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Spec Work

I don’t do free trial projects or speculative work.

The culture of “spec work” is a scourge to society. People do it anyway because they want to work in a cool kid industry.

Its great to be on the other end of because you get to see a wider variation in ideas for free or extremely cheap, pick the one you like, then take credit for it so your colleagues can tell you what a brilliant artistic mind you have.

If I were a talentless creative director, I would shill for this system all day long.

The free work you should actually do:

• Learn new skills and add them to your portfolio.

• Make ads for your business for free until one hits.

• Start a YouTube channel or grow an Instagram/LinkedIn/TikTok/Email list/whatever.

This is more than enough to make a case that your services are worth paying for. Don’t let someone cuck you into “proving yourself” to them because they worked at HBO for a couple years.

Where to get help on the sales stuff

I’m not really a sales guy so if you see ways to improve the way I do it, I’m all ears!

This is just my current method and I still have plenty to learn. I’m sure they are ways to optimize, but it works well enough to keep me busy.

Unlike when I started, we now have access to all these sweet Jungle accounts dedicated to sales skills like and

Follow these guys on Twitter, buy their courses, pay for consults with them if you’re really struggling in this department. Whenever I need to sharpen my skills up for a big call, this is where I go.

If you want a second opinion on all of this from someone on the other side of the glass who you could potentially be pitching your services to, especially if youre into video or media, works in content marketing and writes a Substack called that would be worth checking out.

Gig Marketplaces

Avoid. This is a trap. Unless you want to become a commodity because you enjoy having things in common with literal soybeans.

Fiverr, Upwork, Thumbtack, all these kinds of places. Fuck these things. You’re competing with too many people charging rock bottom prices.

No one sees what differentiates you. They see your prices first. On a Zoom call with a prospect, I literally do the opposite. Show as much value as possible upfront, try to address objections before they come up, and package prices + offer are the last thing we get to.

I used to scan these for marketplace work from time to time just to see, but its not even worth that. Go walk the dog, call your mom, or stare at a wall for 15 minutes. All would be more productive activities.

Being the expensive guy on a list of 200 freelancers charging $15-45/h is a good way to not be able to pay your electric bill.

If you live in a country where that is lot of money, it might be worth the time to do some of this work but I’ve never personally been in this position.

Even if that’s the case, putting effort into learning English fluently, learning about US culture, and how to sell your services independently has an absolutely insane upside for you. Do that instead of getting stuck on Upwork forever.

Also. The good clients I work with don’t want to deal with hiring people on these platforms as much as I don’t want to be on them.

Why would you want to build out a presence on gig marketplaces that people go to where the main attraction is cheap services? This is a step away from being a Wal-Mart greeter as far as I’m concerned.

An alternative strategy

If you are trying to pitch something like design or video services, you’d be better off going on a job website like Indeed or LinkedIn, search for companies hiring content marketing positions, then get those on your radar because you know they’re planning on investing in content in the near future.

You’ll hit them up, probably get a no which is actually a “not right now” then follow up once the position is filled.

A new hire is going to lean toward using people they already have a relationship with because they want to look good for their boss, but if you have strong portfolio pieces you’re eventually going to find someone who will take a chance on you for whatever reason. Maybe their main guy is unavailable, their boss hit them with a novel request, whatever.

When that happens, just make sure you give them an excellent experience that makes them want to come back and recommend you. Make them look like a genius for choosing you.

Which leads me to..

Referrals

You will eventually get people passing your name around once you’ve delivered great results for a client. Some people even like to brag that they have “the best guy” for something.

This makes life easier. The general level of trust is higher with a referral than a cold lead or someone who finds you via marketing efforts.

Chances are decent that they’re already familiar with your work through the person who put a good word in for you.

Be careful about offering discounts. Avoid if possible. I find referrals ask for this more often because they’re more comfortable with you right away.

One trap I fell into was you give Person A a discount because there were on the line and needed a little push to close. Margin is tighter, but it goes well otherwise so you’re good. They then refer you to their good friend Person B who wants the discounted price, but then pushes for more on top of that because they like to haggle. You can’t do that, so you pass. Now Person A gets weird with you because you rejected their friend.

So I’m not a big fan of incentivizing people with discounts. Your price is the price for a reason.

If a client needs to work with you on pricing, that’s fine, subtract services or deliverables but don’t do $1,000 in work for $700. It’s better to incentivize them with value.

“The $6k package is double what the $3k one is in cost, but you get way more than double the value because of A, B, and C” That kind of thing.

Some people just like to bitch about price and want to see the number go down so they feel like they won the negotiation. Sure you can price in some wiggle room for people that need this itch scratched, but people who do this tend to be a pain in the ass who send pages of the most anal retentive revision notes about things that don’t matter.

My move is to tell them to go shop around, even point them to a few other options and mean it. I’ll also say that I’m not the cheapest option and explain what to watch out for if they go that route.

This is a good defense against people that aren’t a good fit for me and they go take their used car guy haggle routine somewhere else.

Or they go talk to 3 other companies then come back because the other offers were not as good.

Or they go with the cheap guy after I warned them to watch out for X, Y, and Z. One of those things happens and they come back to me because I was at least honest with them it proves that I know what I’m talking about.

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Marketing Yourself As Freelance vs “Freelance”

Now I finally get to tell you what I mean by “freelance” work.

Even if you’re working on your own and hiring help as you need it, it makes way way more sense to position yourself as a company or agency.

You look more established and can charge more money for basically the same work with a little extra setup.

This is a move out of the playbook. You can do well as an indie freelancer or solopreneur if you really aren’t a corporate 9-5 kind of person. I can speak to that personally.

But. Don’t go around telling people that.

Most people think Freelance = you’re poor

Be mad if you want. But it’s true. People think freelancer is a euphemism for “unemployed person scraping by on $20K a year.”

In my rougher years I lived this life and discovered that basically nobody feels bad for you. They love telling you to get a real job and be miserable. Like them.

In my better years, pure jealously. You work for yourself and you’re doing well? Parasite People will actively try to sabotage or steal your work. Downplay the perks and tell the Parasite People how hard and stressful it is.

Agency isn’t a scary word

If you’re like me, you prefer to work mostly on your own. The thought of running a busy office with a bunch of people who all have HR grievances is hell on earth.

This not what your agency will be. You’re going to do mostly the same work with a few extra steps.

It’s all the same work

Your initial “agency” or dev shop or whatever you choose to start is going to be you plus 1-5 other people you hire for jobs as needed. Maybe you purchase white label services as an add on for your clients. That’s it. If you want to scale up, cool but you don’t have to if you want to build some other thing.

Your life isn’t that different than if you were advertising yourself as a solo person for hire in terms of what you actually do, but you can go after bigger clients for juicier rates.

A company with a budget is going to be way more comfortable partnering with XYZ Motion & Video Services for their content needs over Phil C. from Syracuse who does video on weekends. They want an invoice from a real company. Not a Venmo request from Phil.

Its fine if Phil starts out doing a few jobs on his own to test the waters, but if it’s a go he needs to get that LLC setup, get a tax ID, and build out the basic infrastructure of a company.

For me, this means instead of charging $1500 for a one-off brand video, I can charge $3,000 and sell them on a monthly retainer package to make ads or social media content which can vary from $3k-$12k/mo depending on the needs of the company you’re working with.

Your marketing activities are going to be more or less exactly the same to get inbound leads. You don’t need to paint your logo on a blimp. Your marketing won’t be that different than the usual stuff.

You need a company website, a sales process and billing infrastructure.

Email contact form at the least, but these days I’d recommend a service like Calendly where leads can book a call with you. For invoicing and my books, Quickbooks works fine for me.

Write SEO articles, run some paid traffic, collect testimonials & case studies, find an organic social media channel you’re good at, etc except instead of “hire me” the message is “book a call with us”.

This takes some time to build up which is why you need to start with cold outreach to get the ball rolling, however once you have delivered work to a few clients successfully and spent time on marketing, people will start to come to you.

Fortunately, unlike being an influencer or selling a mass market product you do not need an enormous online audience or email list to sell to. 4-6 solid clients can easily keep your schedule full and then some.

You’ll have a reputation. Instead of being worried about finding clients, you’re more concerned about saying no to things, scaling up so you can accept more work without a quality compromise, or finding other ways to add value for them. This can flip much faster than you think.

You suffer for a few months of bleeding while you try to get clients in the door, but then in another 3 months you have more work than you know what to do with.

WAGMI

If you made it to the end of this, good shot you have the fire in your belly required to operate working for yourself. This article is on the longer side, but hopefully is one you come back to as you build.

There’s a staggering amount of NGMI level information out there on this topic, most of which I’ve tried at one point or another because I didn’t know any better.

I blame a lot of this on the rise of ‘gig economy’ work which is in many ways a renegotiation of the same old same old with a shiny new tech veneer.

Don’t let the people who think that’s the only option discourage you. There’s just too many people out there who need help from someone like you with specialized skills, but hopefully this article shows you that how you package and deliver your skills makes a massive difference in terms of what you take home from your effort.

You’ll still have to fill in gaps and adapt this to your talents and experience, but this gives you a framework for what to do and more importantly a framework for knowing what information to reject.

I hope this saves you from learning some things the hard way like me. Good luck!

Quite the spread. This post is for people who are on the greener side of things and just getting their feet wet.

Or maybe you make a ton of videos on a small army of phones already but want more powerful tools on the desktop.

Which software do is the best to start with? How much does it matter? What about things like CapCut or RunwayML? Where do they fit into the ecosystem?

All questions I get regularly in DMs. Answer is usually the same.

Start with Davinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. One of those two will be your bread and butter, then add things depending on your needs. Do a lot of podcasts? Check out Descript. Need to animate graphics or text beyond basic transitions? Learn After Effects.

Why These Two?

Simple, I use both Davinici Resolve and Adobe Premiere regularly and have good reason to.

People ask about Final Cut Pro, Filmora, Sony Vegas, AVID and a few others but I can’t really comment much because I don’t have my hands on those very much.

Between Resolve and Premiere, my bases are very well covered. Whether that’s animating titles, cutting footage together, doing very specific color correction tasks, or working with stock assets.

Where should a complete n00b start?

If your totally new to video editing and need somewhere to start, go download the free version of Davinci Resolve, open a browser window to Google or YouTube. Look up basic “getting started” tutorials and don’t plan on closing that window it for a month.

At the least go look up how to import footage and add basic title text then fill in your knowledge as you go.

The free tier of Resolve has a few features and effects that they limit to only the paid version, but for the most part there’s very little childproofing.

It’s very very powerful to the point where I was scratching my head. How is this no money? They sell hardware interfaces that are awesome and range from a few hundred bucks to $40-50K. You can get one of those later if you want. Spending $400 for the Speed Editor was a big help for the jog wheel alone.

More importantly..

Davinci has a free/one-time pricing structure. If you want to upgrade, there’s no subscription. The full copy of Resolve is half the price of a single year of Adobe Creative Cloud.

This is probably a much better fit for someone who works in sprints and is not doing video content every week You might need to knock out a bunch of content for a product launch, then your next two months not so much because you’re focused on other tasks.

Same deal for someone who is young/student/living with parents/etc and still figuring themselves out. Nice not to be locked into a subscription for something you’re not entirely sure is the right direction to go.

The Skills Transfer

Lets say you learn the living shit out of Resolve and then need to switch to Adobe Suite because you need some only Adobe has it feature or program.

Resolve is a deep enough program that a lot of what you learn will transfer over to other products. The same cannot be said if you decided to do everything in CapCut or iMovie. There’s going to be a lot of new concepts and tools to learn so you’ll be fighting a steeper learning curve.

If you’re coming from Resolve, it’s mostly all the same stuff but the buttons are in different places. You’ll switch over pretty painlessly.

So, I’ll say it again. If you’re new to editing and want actionable advice on where to start: Begin with the free version of Davinici Resolve and branch out from there if necessary.

Resolve is also better at some things

Even if you decide to be a full blown Adobe bro, knowing Resolve will still help you. No reason you can’t bounce footage between both.

It allows you to do very specific things with color correction that can transform average looking video footage to a professional looking result. Go look up before and after videos on YouTube of people doing color grading tutorials to see.

Both the color grading page as well as the Fusion page in Resolve (Fusion is their equivalent of After Effects) use a node-based workflow that is completely different than how Adobe does things.

This took me some getting used to, but sometimes it’s easier to have a visual representation of what is affecting what via the node tree. It’s closer to programming in the sense that if some effect you want doesn’t exist, but you can break that effect down into a series of steps, you can build it yourself.

The Adobe way of doing things is basically to bury features in layers of menus that keeps getting more bloated as they add new features.

Also, the Resolve editing workflow is in one software. Want to do After Effects-like things on a single clip in your edit, just pop over to the Fusion tab, do your thing, then go back. The Adobe ecosystem is not like this. You have to bounce between entirely different programs which gets clunky sometimes.

Time To Shill For Adobe

Adobe is more expensive and requires a subscription plan. Their way or the highway and they know it.

But I’d jump straight in here if you know you’re going to need tools like Photoshop or a dedicated audio editor.

Depending on which plan you do, you’ll pay around $80 a month for the full Adobe Creative Cloud or you can pay $50/mo with a 1-year commitment (there’s a fee if you bail out early).

I wouldn’t bother with single app subscriptions for the most part because a lot of the value of using Adobe products is in the ecosystem.

You can edit a graphic in Photoshop or Illustrator, drag that straight into After Effects and edit. If you change your PSD or AI file, you see those changes reflected in After Effects. Then you can send that whole thing to a Premiere session where you finalize your edit.

But the Adobe ecosystem isn’t limited to just their products.

The community and 3rd party software ecosystem is much larger. If you subscribe to Motion Array, they have Premiere and After Effects specific assets like transitions, effects, and even whole project template files you can customize. Entire businesses are built around selling 3rd party scripts like Video Copilot and AEscripts.

There is additionally a much bigger variety of educational and tutorial content, both free and paid with Adobe as well.

If hiring a pro video editor to take over or collaborate with is on your roadmap anytime soon, this is another good reason to just jump in with Adobe because odds are high they use it. Collaborating will be much smoother if you’re on the same system.

How I’ve starting doing things if I’m setting up a VA to work on something for me, I’ll make a project file, record a screencast demonstrating anything, then send that off while the VA does the more time-intense, repetitive work, then set that back and I finish.

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Other Stuff

Tools like Runway are very interesting. They're building some legitimately amazing AI features. My friend and Jungle resident zoomer expert has recommended CapCut and I'd probably look into this if I was banging out TikTok content for a lot of my day on a small army of burner phones.

But for most of my work I consider this stuff supplemental and am not going to make this the central place where most of my work comes together because there are too many limitations. Missing a feature like basic batch export can be a real bummer if you’re aiming to push a lot of content out.

Speaking of which..

Batch Export

Both Adobe and Davinci have this and it’s silly not to take advantage of it. Its built into Resolve’s Deliver page and Adobe uses a software called Media Encoder. They both do the same thing more or less. You are able to export videos from your project to their final format.

I like Media Encoder more personally because sometimes I need to transcode a bunch of existing video or audio files from one format to another that don’t need any editing. Just drag them in, set some numbers, and hit go.

This will come in handy if you’re hiring pro camera operators to shoot footage for an event or something and expect to have them turn over footage that you will edit with your people. Many higher end cameras shoot in specialized codecs that you can’t just drag into your editor and go, so you need to transcode to something more edit friendly like Apple ProRes 422. Media Encoder helps and Premier is kind of the honey badger of video editors. Performance might not be ideal, but you can drag in all kinds of weird footage to the timeline and it usually handles it.

If you’re still in Davinci land and open source tool I used in the pre-Adobe days was FFmpeg. More of a nerdy developer type of tool, but it’s good to eat your vegetables. Learn it.

But back to batching. Another common task is I have to render 30 videos for a client that are all variations of a social media ad. There’s just no way I’m sitting there doing them one by one.

Instead, setup In and Out points on each video in the timeline, set render output settings, hit go, get lunch, then check everything when I’m back.

Just Start

This is really the biggest thing. Don’t over think stuff.

If you read this whole thing and still don’t know where to start, you’d be better off flipping a coin and getting busy instead of sitting around for another 2 weeks researching it.

You will need Adobe After Effects which is included in the Creative Cloud subscription along with Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, and everything else you need to make incredible content. Sign up via that link and you’ll be helping to support free guides like today’s article.

The RGB Effect

This prism like effect is basically some RGB displacement and blur. Not nearly as complicated as it looks.

The obvious use of this is customizing it with your own text for titles or captions, so if you’re new just follow along and you’ll have a cool project you can play with by the end and reuse for other things.

But I’d strongly encourage you to experiment with each component here and find ways to apply it. The big chunks are motion keyframing which is covered here, splitting the graphic into its color channels on different layers, the Posterize effect, and some motion blur we will make by hand.

Yes, I know you’re busy but remember that content skills compound over time and will make you better at working with a team when you’re ready to outsource it to others.

The Effect Step by Step

Make a new composition and call it TEXT. 2000x2000px is fine, 30fps. I’m going to make it 25 seconds long. Not necessary, but its nice to have the space if I want to reuse this later with a longer chunk of text.

Now create a text layer in TEXT and type BANKS ARE ZEROS. I’m using Akira Expanded Super Bold font at 150px. Put each word on a new line and center everything by using the Align tab. If you can’t see the tab, go to Window > Align in the top drop down menus, next to the Help dropdown.

This is our starting graphic.

Next we’re going to need to create a Map that won’t be directly visible in the final result, but its contents will affect what we see.

(Another technique to keep in the back of your head next time you need to put the sauce on some plain looking graphics)

Make a Map

Make another Composition of the same size and length and name it MAP.

Inside of MAP, create a new solid layer, search the Effects and Presets pane for Gradient Ramp and drag that on to your solid layer. You will see it change from a solid color to this:

Search for the Posterize effect in the same menu, add it, and the Gradient will be quantized into a few zones. You can control how many with the Levels control in the effect menu. When you’re done with the guide, this is a good setting to tinker with later.

Make another Composition with the same settings and call it MAIN. Open it and drag in your TEXT comp and MAP comp, then make the MAP comp invisible by unchecking the little eye icon all the way to the left of the layer.

Add the Displacement Map effect (search Effects and Presets menu as usual) to the TEXT layer. Max horizontal displacement should be set to 0 and the Displacement Map Layer should be set to MAP.

Now drag the Max Vertical Displacement Slider into the negative values and watch what happens. You’ll start to see the beginnings of the effect. We’re going to keyframe the motion and blur the displacements to help keep the focus on the main text.

One problem you may have is the word “BANKS” is getting cut off. Toggle your MAP layer back on to see why:

I’m going to open up the MAP Comp and adjust my Posterize effect to have 19 Levels instead of 7.

Drag the Max Vertical Displacement way way into the negatives to make your text disappear completely. In my project this is a little over -10,000. Set a keyframe at the start of the Comp.

Move the playhead in the timeline to about 1 second later and set another keyframe and give this parameter a value of zero.

Highlight both keyframes and hit F9 to add easing curves to smooth out the motion. Additionally, instead of using a dome shaped motion speed, I opened up the Speed Editor and used the yellow handles to make the motion start quickly and slowly ease to a stop.

Here’s a clip of what this looks like in motion by this step:

https://twitter.com/BowTiedTamarin/status/1655634725522776066?s=20

(Sry for no embed. Chris Best and Elon are frenemies now.)

Blur Me Like One Of Your French Girls, Jack

The motion is nice, but it looks very digital. Lots of hard edges. Various blur effects help smooth this out and are honestly a ton of the After Effects magic that add that extra something to animations. Search Directional Blur and add it to your TEXT comp layer in the MAIN compositon.

In the effect controls, set the Blur Length to 0 and drop a keyframe at the start. Somewhere in the middle of the animation, drop another keyframe with the Blur Length set to 60ish.

Put the playhead directly over the keyframe where your motion stops. Set a 3rd KF with the Blur Length back at 0.

There are other times when we can just click the Motion Blur box and After Effects will do the hard work for us, but when that isn’t possible due to the way Pre-Comps are nested, this is how you can create a motion blur effect by hand pretty quickly and apply it to anything. Keep this one in your mental toolbox.

Remember what we did to adjust the motion in the Speed Editor for the last step? Do the same thing to the Blur Length keyframes. F9 to set easing then adjust the speed so most of the action occurs in the middle of the animation like this:

This makes sense if you think about it. The text should be the most blurry when it’s moving around the most at the fastest rate of speed.

This is a huge part of making things look convincing in motion software. Think about how something would literally move step by step in real life and be able to explain it in great details, as well as how you would perceive those events.

For confidence, here is what my video looks like at this stage: https://twitter.com/BowTiedTamarin/status/1655642053944958980?s=20

RGB Effects and Final Touches

We’re nearly done at this point, we just need to add the RGB displacement that makes this really pop.

Select both the TEXT and MAP layers in your Comp, right click, and select Pre-Compose and name this Pre-Comp RGB

Now you have everything on one layer. Add the Shift Channels Effect to this layer.

Set Take Red from to Red, then the other two color channels to Full Off. Your text will unsurprisingly, turn Red.

Duplicate your Pre-Comp 2 more times and repeat these steps respectively for the Blue and Green channels. For example your Green layer should have Take Red and Take Blue set to Full Off and Take Green set to Green.

Rename the layers respectively and change the blending mode from Normal to Add.

At this point the 3 color channels will all sum to white and your animation will look exactly the same.

To get the color separation for the prism like effect, simply move each layer over a few frames so they arrive into position at slightly different times. Where they overlap it will turn white because the colors sum, then we see individual color channels where they don’t.

As a final step, if you don’t want the ending text to be too blank and clean looking, move the position of each layer slightly to the right or left and adjust the Scale of each layer to be slightly different. 5-10 pixels is enough.

Then add slightly different instances of Glow Effect to each layer to soften the look and we get the final result as the video at the top of the email.

Your Feedback

Let me know how you do with this and if having more video examples is helpful.

I’m posting some examples as tweets simply to help people find the newsletter and encourage sign ups, but I’m also looking into some different formats for this newsletter.

A lot of people prefer to read because they can work at their own pace (me included) but I might try some different formats for these guides like a text version for free subs and a video demo for paid subs.

But it would be great to hear from you directly on this. If you have any opinions on what would be most helpful for you, let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Even if you have no interest in making black and white cartoons in the specific style I have done for BowTiedBull, this is a good technique to know because it will teach you about a useful built in AE script, Null objects, and how you can connect elements to build up a more complex structure.

Tried to be as clear as possible, but AE is still old bloated software with a lot of bad manners so its easy to miss a detail or discover yet another odd bug that appears every time, some of the time.

Go through this slowly and expect to do some troubleshooting as you go.

And keep in mind that some of the best learning in any tutorial is when you have to go dig in Google to solve some unexpected problem. Forces you to think and function independently which is the ultimate goal here.

The Basic Problem:

Making a basic 3D cube in AE is surprisingly annoying and some of the methods I’ve seen demonstrated in tutorial land use overlapping edges which I can never get perfect.

There are paid plugins around to make 3D primitives, or you can also fire up Cinema 4D Lite for a better experience, but that is not without its compromises. Using the C4D renderer makes using certain After Effects features more tedious.

For example, if you like to put Glow Effect on everything (guilty), you still can, but you need to put your C4D rendered stuff inside Pre-Comps which makes refining timing more tedious or you can render it out as a video file, but then you need to re-render anytime you want to go back and make adjustments.

There’s a time and place for these techniques, but today we’re going to add another method to your toolbox.

What Not To Do

I don’t like any of the methods a lot of folks teach on YouTube that involve drawing a square in 3D space, duplicating it, then rotating and positioning to form each side of the cube.

Every time I do this there’s always some janky edge somewhere that doesn’t line up exactly.

Can you get away with it sometimes and hide the flaws? Sure.

But there is another way.

We can trick AE into making 2D objects look 3 dimensional and the magic sauce is a built in jsx script.

Let’s Cook

I’m going to go through each of the steps and assume you know how to do basic, Googlable things like draw lines and shapes.

Make a fresh Comp

First, make a new Composition in a fresh AE project. Start with a 2000 x 2000 resolution.

Draw A White Square

Very important to draw the square using this method due to weird AE quirks:

Select the rectangle option from the Shape Tool. Then double click the icon. This creates a square the size of your Comp. Next, scale this down to 25% using the global Transform, not Transform: Rectangle 1. Delete the Fill and set Stroke to 40px.

The other ways I tried all resulted in the Nulls not getting placed correctly.

Inside the Stroke settings, set everything to be rounded as follows:

-Line Cap: Round Cap
-Line Join: Round Join

If you can’t find these settings, the usual path is to expand your shape layer, then Contents, then Rectangle 1, then Stroke 1

You should have something like this. Make sure you leave some room to move things around and position the sides of the cube.

Convert To Bezier Path

If you create a shape layer and draw a shape like a square, AE creates a fixed shape. It can only be one thing. You can’t take the edge of a rectangle and make it curve or morph it into some other abstract shape.

But if you make it Bezier path, it can do whatever shape you want.

We will need this ability to manipulate the perspective of our square and this will create the illusion of a 3D object in AE’s “2.5D” environment.

Go to Content > Rectangle 1 > Rectangle Path and right click. Choose “Convert to Bezier Path”

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Why?

The core value prop is you can edit audio and video content with a text based workflow, but it has a bunch of other helpful AI-based features bundled together.

Is it changing the world, replacing jobs, or sending Adobe to the stone ages? Unlikely.

But for certain tasks it can cut down on editing time in a big way. This is an awesome use of AI to make work more efficient.

BowTiedTalon makes a very good point here:

I use a hardware controller with a jog wheel to quickly scroll around a recording when I edit, but being able to just read along is even faster. Being able to search for and edit out “ums” and “uhs” en masse is also a big benefit—this is a real pain using a timeline based editor. Descript also has an automated function to highlight and remove your stuttering and stammering.

I’d actually love a native plugin for Adobe or Resolve that I could drop on to a clip and automatically cut clips that are likely filler words, then be able to delete or adjust as I go.

But for now there’s actually an Adobe integration, so this is something I might use or have an assistant use to prep future projects for me.

Quick Note On Earning Money With This

Something to keep in mind is the BowTied community is months to years ahead on a staggering number of things. If you’re looking for ways to make money and add value with media skills, don’t read this and convince yourself not to bother because “now everyone has this”.

Yes this a tool that is available to whoever, but a lot of people don’t even try or just don’t have the time to deal with it themselves. I will certainly use this tool at some point to fix bad audio and look like a magician.

Then there are the economic problems going on that you can read about over on BowTiedBull which plenty of people will use as an excuse to not even try.

Stuff like this gives you an easy boost. Don’t blow your lead.

Getting Started

The best way to get a feel for a tool like this is to jump in and start doing stuff. And their docs are pretty clear so you shouldn’t have much trouble getting up and running.

No sense in regurgitating their docs and pitch deck for you, but here are examples of things I’d try to play with first, along with some ideas for how to apply them.

Transcribing A Video

You can literally drag and drop in a video or audio, wait a bit, then it will have transcribed your video.

Are you the type of creator that makes YouTube videos from a script of loose bullet points and improvising as you go?

This feature is sick if you want to transcribe the video quickly and get it into your keyword tool like Surfer SEO to adapt it to a blog article and get some extra site traffic. Don’t forget to embed your video on the page when you’re done. Feed the spider.

Remove Filler Words & Add Captions

I touched on this earlier, super helpful.

Even if you plan on editing in a more standard editor like Premiere or Resolve, if you’re cleaning up an hour long podcast episode it makes all kinds of sense to scrub out the fluff inside Descript first, then export to your primary editor.

You also have a couple options with captioning video. You can use their auto captioning feature which offers some basic options.

Or you can use the Descript transcription and dump that into Premiere or even After Effects if you want to have more control over placement and transitions. This can be done manually or you can use Descript to import .srt caption files into Premiere.

It Has A Basic Timeline Editor

Obviously not as robust as a more mature DAW like Logic Pro or Adobe Audition, but you can do some basic tasks right in Descript if you find it easier to look at waveforms, want to automate some crossfades, or need to apply basic effects like compression and EQ.

Want to know about recording and editing voice in a more standard way? That is covered in depth here and here (both free articles)

Create a Model of Your Voice

For the readers who are public or bowtieds who are comfortable with putting their voice out there, you can create a model of your own voice.

Instead of using a canned text-to-speech AI voice, you now can type to talk in your own voice.

If you do a lot of audio content or make videos with voiceover, the obvious benefit here is you can save a ton of time because you don’t have to actually sit and record it, or dub in sections to correct sections where you made a mistake.

Even if you are still going to do live recorded audio, you might want to try folding in some AI audio with the real audio where it makes sense.

Clean Up Your Voice

One of the more magical features of Descript is the Studio Sound AI.

Most people are familiar with basic noise cancellation features and maybe know how to EQ their voice. Or use a de-reverb plugin for room noise if you want to get really fancy.

But Descript does a killer job at making all this very easy and going past what is possible with traditional tools.

You can talk into a crappy phone or computer mic and significantly enhance the sound quality. Recording with a good mic still sounds better for now, but probably not to the level where most people will care.

Kind of similar to how iPhone cameras aren’t going to replace full frame Canon or Sony cameras, but they’re still close enough for the average person.

Hear it for yourself:

Don’t Want To Dox Your Voice & Want To Sound Like A Celebrity Instead? How to clone whatever voice you want.

This is tedious, unlikely to have a long shelf life, and certainly not something they want you doing.

So consider this a “grey hat” technique.

Don’t do this on your work account and do not break the law.

Disclaimer out of the way, this is what to do..

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Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

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Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Tamarin's Treetop Laboratory, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Tamarin's Treetop Laboratory can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

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Tamarin's Treetop Laboratory

Making Money With Video Production: Freelancers

Becoming Unemployable I’ve gotten more than a few DMs to the tune of, “Hey pretty videos are nice, but how do you make money with this?” These are the two types who are interested in learning about making video content that I can advise on: You’re a…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · BowTiedTamarin

My last article (see above) was for people looking to break into video production for their full time work or as a side income stream. For this article we’re going to get into how a business owner can approach video production to grow their business, using mostly organic content.

If you’re already in the video business and work with companies often, this should help you see things from their side and help guide them.

But the main focus today is situations where the primary business is not video.

This is more for people with some kind of business that might be looking at hiring Influencers or User-Generated Content (UGC) people for marketing purposes alongside their internal content efforts.

Making video isn’t your primary activity. You make money doing some other thing, but know how powerful visual content can be. You might have an eCommerce store, a brick and mortar store, or have a local service business.

You also know how much of a pain in the ass visual content can be. It takes up a ton of your time, requires learning a bunch of unfamiliar stuff, or hiring people who do all that for you, but cost a big chunk of money because it’s a pain in the ass.

Monke Business

For the perspective on how video fits into the ecosystem of the rest of your business, go read by BowTiedOpossum. He has great content around both online business as well as setting up service and consulting businesses.

One theme you need to take from there and apply here is getting out of your own way enough to sit down and do the right kind of work. Not things you think you’re supposed to do or ego massaging activities.

A lot of this article is inspired by people I’ve worked with who get an idea in their head that they can’t let go of for some reason, which ultimately wastes time. They ask for advice, then they don’t take it because THEY are the boss with the big ideas.

They think they need cinema quality video from day 1.

They think they need to be on every platform from day 1.

They want to be internet famous and the content becomes too about them.

Or their quality standards are too low from day 1 and they don’t improve.

Or they think their cousin Charlie is the funniest person ever and Charlie needs to write all the scripts, etc.

Tell Charlie To Go To Hell. Maybe.

There is an extremely low probability you will make the perfect type of video from the start with your big ideas and totally hilarious cousin Charlie.

All your ideas are valid, but they are just ideas.

I promise you will be surprised at the stuff that resonates vs. the stuff that flops. Recently I had some videos that I thought flopped 3-4 years ago, but came back from the dead because something in the YouTube algorithm changed. Content is good, but just wasn’t getting traction at the time for whatever reason.

Try a lot of stuff and make your goal to improve something with every video. The Mr. Beast advice here is simple to say, hard to actually do, but holds up.

Maybe it turns out with a little instruction, Charlie actually is kind of funny. You don’t know until you try some variations and see what catches.

Improving production quality is the EASIEST part

Your first videos will be trash. Probably. This is fine. What’s not fine is not finding ways to improve things.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably smart enough to go learn how to shoot, how to edit, how a lens works, how to color grade, etc. It’s just time. This is not brain surgery.

To a point, better looking videos will probably help you. People like nice things and view it as a sign that you know what you’re doing.

What is actually hard? Figuring out why the throwaway selfie video you shot at a noisy cafe got 50,000 views in a day. It’s counter intuitive. Something about the messaging resonated.

Sometimes “improving” doesn’t mean you’re making things look better, just doing more of what works.

Video is an SEO activity

The more I learn about SEO, the more I see video is the same thing but with moving pictures.

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I’ve gotten more than a few DMs to the tune of, “Hey pretty videos are nice, but how do you make money with this?”

These are the two types who are interested in learning about making video content that I can advise on:

• You’re a freelancer or aspiring to be one.

• Have some kind of business you’re looking to market and want to do content production in-house for creative control or cost reasons.

I can’t comment about working a day job as a video editor because I’ve never done it and enjoy my unemployed pirate person lifestyle.

But I have a lot of experience working as a team of one with small businesses that need help marketing themselves or larger companies producing brand content and live stream events, so those are some areas I can talk about.

Huge topics with a lot of ground to cover and some nuance you will have to provide yourself, but you’ll learn lots as you go.

The main thing you want to avoid is going on Reddit, seeing morons complain they can’t find video work that pays more than $15/h or cheapo business owners complaining that they can’t find anyone reliable despite offering a most honorable and generous reward in the sum of fifteen whole, red white and blue American dollars per hour, then think thats how it all works.

It is not.

This email will cover Freelance life and the following will be more focused on Business owners. If you work with freelancers a lot this might still be useful as well.

Quit working for The Man, man.

So. Fuck your boss, right? Ready to strike it out on your own? I was not when I got into this stuff, but I went to college for an arts degree that has about as much economic value as majoring in SpongeBob Studies.

Shockingly, I had a hard time finding a job post graduation.

So, one broke summer a friend and I used to hang out, drink the kind of vodka that comes in a shatter-proof bottle and brainstorm ways to make money that aren’t illegal, don’t require credentials, but aren’t obvious to our boomer college advisors who are just collecting a check every week.

Wasn’t pretty to start (lots of hilarious jobs stories) but at the end of the day we are both still in the game and our friends are jealous we don’t have a boss and can go for a swim or golf at 11AM on a Tuesday while they’re stuck in 6 hours of Zoom calls about nothing.

The greater point is you have to roll like there’s no turning around. It’s much easier said than done. Be stubborn. Getting past the common problems (we’ll discuss those pretty extensively) requires a certain do or die kind of attitude.

You will have difficult clients, you will have slow months, and you will not have anyone to blame or fix problems for you, especially in the beginning. You’ll be on your own a lot. These challenges tend to be very good at sending people back to their old day job.

As two broke, inexperienced arts graduates there was no day job to go back to and we didn’t have the kind of parents that would let us live at home until we figured it out.

NOTE: You don’t have to do it all completely solo. Over time, you will meet other people in the industry and happy clients will refer you. These contacts are very valuable. Chances are good that your first really legit client will come to you this way. You’ll be slogging it out and get a call from a contact who has a big job they are too busy to take or the yoga studio you did a $500 YouTube video for years ago dropped your name to their friend who works for a hedge fund and needs helps with a project.

Main problems you’ll face because everybody complains about it at some point:

• Niche selection

• How to find and attract clients

• Figuring out your value in the marketplace

• Managing your time. Especially if you’re FT work from home.

• New skill acquisition. Big ticket client has some weirdo request? New tech dropped? Guess who gets to figure it out. By Tuesday.

• Real deal burnout. Not like, “I’m le tired today”. Concerning, you-can’t-function-normally and make a cup of coffee burnout.

None of these problems are new or unique to you. These are all things you can solve for in a number of different ways. I’m going to go through them all one by one. If I missed anything, let me know in the comments and I can discuss.

But for now let’s say you declare yourself a part time freelancer, starting immediately.

First problems: you have no work and no niche. Everything else I listed comes after that.

Picking a Niche

Saying you do “Video Production” is like saying you code. It encompasses a lot of things and you’re not going to do them all. Editing, motion graphics, 3D work, technical direction, projection, lighting, live audio, studio audio, teleprompting, production assistant, there are many things that need to be done and often require specialized skills.

You’re most likely going to have to learn a bit about everything and try things as you go, but start thinking about a niche sooner than later because this is how you will be competitive and keep good margins.

That said, even if your eventual goal is to do motion graphics from your basement, working in some capacity on a set or livestream will benefit you because you’ll meet people in the business and see how a lot comes together.

Just don’t lose sight of the bigger goal to niche down. Always have that cooking in the back of your head.

Here’s an example of why:

If you want to make money as a drone operator, your competition is nerds who race, crash, and rebuild drones for fun. They work with software guys to develop new stabilization algorithms on weekends. You’re not going to beat people this intense unless you become one. The work that actually pays their bills is pretty boring and not nearly as intense, but they will out compete you for it.

So just try a little of everything until something sticks and you become some hyper specialized nerd? Maybe.

A better way is look for the obvious thing already in front of you or the industry where you have some knowledge or connections. Start there. Go with whatever is in front of you already as long as there is money in it.

For example, I’ve worked a lot with a guy who’s entire 6 figure business is filming dance recitals for small dance schools. He got into it because his daughter’s dance school needed someone.

He did the math. You don’t need particularly crazy cameras, there’s a good margin, and once you’re in with a local mom & pop dance studio, they’ll call you a few times a year for their recitals. He lives in a low cost of living state, so he probably could have kept him + a few assistant people and done reasonably well.

He started filming shows himself and eventually scaled it up to a real business (not just freelancing) by building a list of reliable camera operators he could send out instead so he could focus on the editing & delivery side. Ended up turning into a full blown business that he could maybe even sell to a larger production company.

If you have no idea where to start, think about the kind of environment you’d do best in and where you live (or want to).

• Want to live in a major hub like LA/NYC? Are you an introvert that can sit and make cartoons for 12 hours a day?

• Is there a niche where there’s a clear fit or opportunity for you, like weddings, corporate events, etc?

• Are you just using this to finance some other business you really want or do you want to use freelancing to kickstart a full blown service business like my dance recital friend?

Maybe you can even use the job you have now as a way to pivot in. Another dude I work with a lot got into filming and editing corporate events from his old IT job at a F500 company. He started doing the work while at his old job because nobody else wanted to deal with it.

After meeting some of the other crew he had to hire for events, he started getting calls to fly out to other cities and do the same thing and eventually quit to go do that full time. Now in a hybrid situation where he works as a freelancer for other production companies as well as coordinates shoots independently through his own company.

What I would avoid at all costs: the sexy stuff. Don’t decide you’re going to shoot music videos, work in Hollywood or the legacy entertainment industry in general. If you’re an artistic person, pursue success for yourself so you can make whatever you want without having to answer to anyone other than yourself.

If someone shows you the money, of course take it, but this is not the Substack to read if you want to be the next Stanley Kubrick.

A lot more bullshit flies on this side of things because it’s fueled by a legion of people who are “chasing their passion” and there are a lot of layers of bureaucracy, procedure, and political/seniority nonsense I can’t stand.

A much better approach would be to figure out how to bring the Hollywood to some other place that doesn’t typically have access to it. People love the ego massage of how they look on camera with great lighting, a beautiful lens, and expert editing.

A business example is the guys doing “cinematic” wedding videos. They make the wedding look like a movie and charge a luxury price for it, usually in the neighborhood of $10K and up per client. It’s high stress, seasonal, lots of messy people issues.

Getting Clients and Connections

This is always the first question people ask like it’s a big mystery.

But this is one of those things where people like to play dumb with themselves because they can see the general direction the answer is in and they don’t like it:

You have a part time sales and marketing job now.

There’s an entire sales wing to the BowTied Jungle which I did not have, but you do! SalesGuy, Systems, and Cocoon are all great follows on Twitter. Take advantage of that. Its not the same as selling a SaaS product, but the principles transfer.

Mission #1 at this stage should be getting together a portfolio that’s representative of what you can deliver. Even having 1 or 2 really well done final products is a huge difference vs nothing. If it’s for an actual client, great, but honestly just having examples that show you can make good things is your biggest lever. You can certainly get work from projects you made for fun or learning purposes, I’d just avoid stuff that’s a straight up tutorial where you were spoonfed everything. But something you synthesized that’s original? Totally fair game.

Like any other business, you need to do some outreach and cultivate inbound leads.

Outreach

• If starting from zero, the easiest place to market yourself is people you already know. No reason not to share your portfolio and put it out there you’re doing this now.

• Next up is websites/social media like Craigslist (lots of jokers here but occassionally meet someone REALLY legit on CL) , LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Anything where you can search for keywords like “need video”. No reason not to spend some time here each morning digging for leads. There are paid resources like ProductionHub.com too, but I didn’t find these so useful until I was further along and had more portfolio built up.

• Cold call/email. You can look up both production companies that may need your services as well as prospective clients you can pitch to.

• Job boards. Places like Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. There will be a mix of listings for actual W2 jobs, but you can increasingly find listing for some YouTuber looking to hire a freelance editor or something similar.

Inbound

BowTiedOpossum has a lot of great content around this. I’d start by getting a portfolio website up with work examples, contact info, and start doing Local SEO every week. I’d focus locally at first because it will be easier to rank and assuming you don’t live completely in the middle of nowhere, there’s going to some sort of work for you to do where you live.

You’ll need a site anyway for when your leads from Outreach ask to see your work. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just get a clean Wordpress template and call it a day.

Like any other business, there’s no reason you can’t be sending out HARO responses and writing blog articles to get some inbound leads. This will take more time than the Outbound sources, but as you get traction you’ll build some security for yourself.

If you’re too busy to take work, referring people to a competent colleague will help you build reputation and people will send you work next time they’re in the same position.

Figuring out your value in the marketplace

What do you charge? A good baseline for what the bottom is can be obtained by browsing marketplaces like Fiverr or Upwork. Plenty of people offering the world for $20/h.

I’ve never done work through any of these kind of marketplaces and generally don’t advise you charge by the hour unless you want to get lowballed. Clients also prefer flat rates in my experience.

The best approach for everybody is to estimate the time and effort you think a project will take and then make an offer based on that. I would recommend you track you time internally so you start to develop a sense of what your time is worth and always be looking for ways to push that number up.

When I was starting at zero as a young buck and had no idea what I was doing, I’d go work on sets as a production assistant for $200.

At one point I thought making $600-800 a day to film events was big money and at the time it was a big jump up.

Now, not so much. Considering the actual day, commute, and stress of the event, I only take that stuff if work is slow or it’s something I’m excited about. Thankfully more of the latter than the former these days.

The margin working from home is higher and it’s more chill. Vastly prefer to work in my own studio, hit the gym, then cook my own food at home.

To be fully transparent, my freelance WFH income is not 100% video hustle. I do some part time web dev work, ghost write music if you throw money at me, and have video projects. The animation stuff I’m doing in The Jungle isn’t included in my IRL services yet. If things slow down, building some normie portfolio is on my to do list then we will see where that goes.

I’d like to consolidate a bit to be honest. This is a bit of a schizo situation that isn’t sustainable forever but at the end of the day I’m just asking myself what kinds of things can I do and what has a demand that people will pay for?

When it comes to your value in the marketplace you need to always be self-evaluating if you’re charging correctly and if you want to make more money, but looking for opportunities to help people solve problems. That’s really it.

Also, don’t work for broke people! Don’t do content for your friend who raps and is totally going to blow up soon or some wantrepreneur egomaniac who thinks he is Gary V.

If you are forced to do some free work to get started and build portfolio, be very very sure that the work will be useable to help you net paid projects as soon as possible.

Managing your time

If you’re coming from a 9-5 where you’re used to taking orders, this will take an adjustment, especially if you work from home.

If you have a family, having a dedicated workspace outside your house is probably going to be a necessity at some point. Really hard to focus when the wife, kids, pets etc are causing a ruckus.

You can’t get lazy. Again, track your time. You don’t get paid for just hanging out in the office anymore, you need to produce. Working a genuinely productive 8-10 hours, not including breaks and eating, is not at all the same as going to a day job where most people realistically put in 3-4 hours of productive work.

Do not listen to lifestyle gooroos who tell you when you’re supposed to be productive and how you’re supposed to do this by waking up at 6 minutes before 9 o’clock to sun your balls for 420 seconds before you mediate and journal about how productive you will be today.

Work when your clients need shit and when you function best. That it. If you want to become completely noctural and live like a vampire, you are free to do so.

New skill acquisition

Even once you’re rolling as a freelancer, have clients, getting referral work, and it’s all moving, you need to always be learning something. The world moves fast and you need to have an edge over people.

Early on when I worked cheapo jobs, I ran into a lot of older people who were riding on the struggle bus because they were still trying to chug along doing the same things that worked in 1998. The “ain’t how it used to be” crowd is really dark.

Your best defense against that fits in nicely with building a business anyway is to always be setting aside some time to explore new things. Its stressful, but it’s always great when a client has a specific request and you need to figure out some new thing to pull it off. You don’t want to constantly be in this situation, but this kind of sprint periodically is healthy and will keep you competitive.

The Jungle has been really a blessing in this capacity. I’m doing zero animation work in my day to day life, but I’ve been able to develop this simply because some cartoons were OK with letting me take a swing at it and so far things are going well.

Also, writing After Effects expressions is NOT the way I thought I’d be using Javascript a year ago, but here we are!

The cube from the opening of this animation is a good example. I have a paid article in the queue to break down how this is done because drawing 3D primitives in AE is much more tedious than it should be.

Main point here is you should always have a couple of things on your study list that you just don’t have the time to get to. When things slow down and work isn’t as intense, you go tinker and experiment to learn the new thing.

Personally I’ve got 3-4 things on this list at all times. There are some JS topics I want to go deeper on, a browser-based animation framewoork that looks interesting, the AI sprinkler that seems to relentlessly push out 10 new things a week to check out.

Burnout

Working around real burnout requires you to know your limits and be very good at managing your time.

I forget which Jungle animal said this, but I like it.

Something to the effect of, “If you’re not working hard because you’re worried about burnout, go get burned out first then figure it out”

This is good advice. Only exception is if your work involves risk of injury or something.

But for white collar computer work you should experiment to establish your limits.

Go full psycho for a few months and see if you can push through whatever your maximum is. What is a truly heavy workload that’s unsustainable and only works in short bursts? For health reasons, don’t do this with the help of anything stronger than coffee.

Yes, of course drugs work but this is obviously unsustainable. The point of knowing your limits is to keep yourself healthy over the long haul. You’ll know when you’re just being lazy and need to crack the whip vs when you’re at your true limits and legitimately need a break.

The only way to figure out where you redline is to drive the car fast then fix it when it breaks.

When you’re truly at your limit one of two things generally happens:

1. You’re so tired you do dumb things like try to open your office with your bank card instead of your keys. You will crack an egg straight into the garbage disposal and drop the shell into the pan. Things like that. You’re a walking zombie.

2. You work like a maniac to hit a deadline on a big project. Ah, finally some time to relax. Nope. You wake up sick the next day with the flu and you’re wrecked for a week. I don’t know why, but the body has a way of knowing how to hold it together just long enough to get over a deadline before the rebound effect kicks in.

Going forward, it’s a lot easier to know when you’re working a healthy, but sustainable pace vs. a maniac sprint pace that might only be sustainable for a week or two before it goes over that edge.

In freelancing, you’re usually hustling to get enough work at first and saying yes to all kinds of random things just to build some momentum. Hiring help might not be in the cards yet and you’re hesitant to raise rates. What if you scare away all your clients?

When you’re truly burnt or approaching it, this forces you to make a change.

If your phone is ringing off the hook, raising rates helps improve your margins and cut out cheaper clients who are usually more of a handful to deal with anyway.

The meme about the $500 client responding with a zillion revision notes and the $5,000 client replying “transfer sent, thanks” really is true. Main difference is the $5K guy requires a higher level of trust before they hire you.

Comments? Already Self-Employed?

This started as what I thought would be a shorter post with some tips and quickly turned into a borderline schizo rant.

All good, this is a topic I have some strong feelings about because in real life people tend to ask for my advice on this stuff, then not listen and go do whatever they wanted anyway. Hopefully this helps someone see behind the curtain enough to get after it and drum up a new income stream for themselves.

Let me know any questions or sticking points you have and I can address those individually in the comments.

Would also be great to hear from some of the other self-employed folks on my email list because I’m sure they’re going to have some different takes on things I’ve mentioned here. Nobody is an expert in everything.

Business Owners, You’re Up Next

The second part of this is going to be focused on people with a business that need to make content for marketing or operational purposes and have no interest in doing this on a freelance basis for work. Short form social, YouTube Channel, Ads, brand content, SOP videos, etc.

If this is is you, please don’t be shy about letting me know in the comments any topics you want covered.

I really mean it when I say I can barely draw a stick figure, have incredibly sloppy handwriting, and would get kicked out of an adult coloring class.

Calling me a knuckle dragger would be a compliment since even literal cavemen made better art than me.

So how do you make a cool graphical animation like this with zero ability to draw, even with the help of a computer?

I’m going to explain how its done mostly using free assets you can find online, but to actually do this, you will need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription which is $50-80 per month depending on your plan because this requires multiple pieces of software.

Let’s dive in first with where to get the art and then I’ll cover how to set it up.

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Don’t let the jargon confuse you.

I touched on keying last week but today I want to get into keyframing. Keying is a compositing in a zillion YouTube videos, but here’s a fairly clear, to the point video that shows you the difference between a few important points.

The other detail this video hits on are Easing curves. Linear motion looks weird and jarring to the eye because that’s generally not how things move around in real life. Everything takes time to speed up and slow down. Usually. If I want to animate something crashing into something else, we want the stop to be sudden and abrupt.

If you did the bouncing ball guide in After Effects a few weeks ago you had to work with this a bit. A ball will naturally hang in the air at its apex and then accelerate downward. Generally this is what separates really clean looking animation from something that feels unpolished and clunky.

Animating assets the easy way

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Here’s the last post to get up to speed on the green screen stuff if you found this first:

Tamarin's Treetop Laboratory

How To Use Green Screen Assets

This post is about not growing your own corn when you want to make a taco. I get DMs from people asking how to make x or y animation but when I dig a little deeper its not because they want to make animations, they want to make a video with a message behind it and the animation is helping to serve that cause…

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3 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · BowTiedTamarin

Adobe Premiere

There are two key plugins in Adobe Premiere I typically use and you’ll see that they’re simpler to use than the way Davinci Resolve does it. Pros and cons to both.

Here is how to quickly prep greenscreen footage in Premiere:

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I get DMs from people asking how to make x or y animation but when I dig a little deeper its not because they want to make animations, they want to make a video with a message behind it and the animation is helping to serve that cause.

No need to reinvent the wheel here.

Certain tasks require completely custom work or can be made from Motion Array templates, but for small accents like blinking arrows, a stick figure pointing to something, YouTube Subscribe popups, there are tons of small animations available as green screen assets from stock websites.

You can also find a lot on YouTube by searching “Royalty Free [SOMETHING] green screen”.

Just grab the video, replace the green, and layer it in with your footage. Today we will be working with this video, so if you want to follow along, grab this video now with the youtube to mp4 downloader of your choice.

Similarly, a lot of free and paid stock footage is filmed on a green screen background that you can replace with whatever you want, like this compilation of memes.

Today we’re going to cover how you work with this footage in software like Davinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere. If you use something else, it’s good to find out if it is capable of this compositing technique.

Suitable for beginners or non-visual people who have no idea where to start. Essential for pretty much everybody, even if you just want to add animated subscribe or follow buttons to your social media content.

At the least you’ll be able to throw together funny memes quickly. If you stack this technique with others like Masks, Mattes, various types of blending/blur, you can make some very impressive content.

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Setup

Ok! So you have a mic or two, some stands, headphones and interface and a spot to do this.

Setup in whatever configuration makes sense for the room and make sure everyone talks into the microphone while you’re rolling. Common mistake with condensers is having the mic backwards for the whole recording. If you m…

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“What mic is the best for making videos?”

“I’m starting a podcast and can barely use a computer, wat do?”

“I bought a really expensive mic everyone recommends, but it sounds horrible. Help.”

And all the variations. This is a topic that has come up a bunch of times in DMs since the beginning of the Jungle.

As I’ve said before audio is a no thank you component. When it’s great nobody is going to give a high five and when there are problems EVERYBODY will complain so I’m glad people are asking.

I used to get irritated at this because this is a very very very covered topic online. There’s a zillion YouTube videos and blog articles about this.

But that’s also the problem. There are a zillion YouTube videos and blog articles. Many of which are very poor quality. I went and dug around the other day and YouTube was recommending videos of kid with the zoomer haircut and noticably distorted audio explaining Audacity settings for vocal production. I’d be confused too.

In hindsight I was suffering from a touch of The Curse of Knowledge. I can scrub through a video and tell if its crap pretty quickly, but someone inexperienced with audio won’t be able to do that.

Today we will rectify this and get you sounding hot and crispy.

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What we will cover

0. Recording location (this dictates a lot of the following)

1. Hardware. Gear recommendations for different situations and budget levels.

2. Software. What I like to use for audio work, both free and paid options.

3. Setup, settings, vocal processing.

What is “Good”?

Before we get into details, you need to decide what good means in your situation and understand why things sound the why they do. At a minimum:

• You need to be able to understand what the subject is saying.

• It needs to be loud enough so listeners don’t need to crank their device.

• Distraction free. In most cases this means no major distortion problems and minimizing background noise.

Your phone can do this most of the time. That might be enough for your purposes. You can also screw this up, sometimes more spectacularly, with a crazy expensive rig.

I’m assuming most people reading will want to go a notch better than iPhonr audio.

You want a big, round full sound with a present low end and a clean, pleasing top. That broadcast sound. Or maybe you’re recording out in public for some reason and need to filter background noise. We’ll cover a few scenerios.

Basic Audio Concepts

Need to get in the weeds for a sec about nerd things. If you know about EQ curves and frequencies, skip. If you’re totally new at all this, read on.

The reason a phone sounds like a phone is a lot of frequency information is missing and our ears are not equally sensitive in all hearing ranges.

Some of the more advanced steps in this guide require that you know a bit about basic audio processing and how the ear works.

These are the Fletcher-Munson contours. Basically a graph of how much sound energy is need to hear something at equal volume across the human hearing range which is generously defined as 20Hz (left side) to 20kHz (right side).

20Hz is really low. Its more like a pressure against your body than a sound. That’s why there’s a ramp on the left side of the graph. Same for the other extreme. Most people can’t actually hear 20kHz. We lose our top end from the loudness of modern living and some natural decline with age. In both cases, it takes more energy to percieve these sounds.

See the dip from about 500Hz to 7000Hz? It takes less energy to percieve a sine wave there.

The ear is more sensitive there.

Our hearing is more sensitive there because that’s where a lot of important information lives that helped us survive. Speech, baby crying, big thing coming to eat you, etc.

Phones sound like phones because for engineering purposes, they emphasize this range and dump everything else. If you want to make a “telephone effect” yourself, just filter everything except this range and you’ll have something close.

To get things sounding nice and clean, we need more of a “spread”. You want a mic that gets down into the range where the fundamental frequency voices live and a pleasing top end.

You will also need to do some processing to clean up the range where our ears are more sensitive. You can decide how much you want to emphasize the top end, some of this depends on the mic. A certain amount of silkiness is nice up there, but too much emphasis and it turns into the NPR All Things Considered vibe which is a little too detailed. I don’t want to be able to hear if you shaved that day and had a dental filling fixed 2 weeks ago when you say canoe.

Now, the more tangible stuff.

Recording Location

Where you record will change what equipment and possibly software you need so it’s good to define upfront.

If you’re simply trying to record yourself talking in an indoor space somewhere, you want to scout out a spot with:

Minimal outside noise. Recording next to a window in your office which is by a main road is probably not great. Find a quiet spot.

Minimal room reflection. Best to avoid spaces with tons of room sound. Stay out of echoey places for the most part. They can sound great in musical contexts, but not for dialogue.

Look at a typical vocal booth. It’s basically a small, dead room.

A carpeted bedroom is usually a good option.

If you live in a giant echobox for whatever reasons, there are still some things you can do. You can get or make a vocal shield like the one below. This helps the mic reject the reflections that happen after you speak, the sound bounces off a wall, then hits the mic again a few milliseconds later.

If you plan to do content on the run somewhere that’s loud all the time, like the streets of NYC, this is obviously possible but you will need to select different mics with some compromises and possibly look into some denoising software.

Hardware

I’m going to assume you have a computer. Most modern laptops and desktops are fine for recording a few tracks of audio.

For podcasting or even a large amount of shortform content, I recommend getting an external hard drive and dumping everthing there. Set the drive to auto backup to some kind of cloud service like Dropbox or Backblaze so you don’t have to worry about it.

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Microphone Crash Course

Microphones come in a few major flavors that basically boil down to how it picks up sound and the polar pattern.

Polar pattern describes the places a mic will pick up sound and where it will reject it. Some mics like a cardioid pattern only pick up what is in front of them and reject what is behind them. Others pick up all around the mic (Omnidirectional).

A supercardioid mic pattern is desirable for loud environments because the polar pattern is tighter than a typical cardioid. It’s designed to pickup whatever is directly in front of it and reject anything off-axis.

The two styles of mic you’ll see commonly are Dynamic and Condensor. Both have pros and cons and come in many variations. Small condensors have their place, but for getting the big broadcast condensor sound, you want to stick to mostly large diaphragm condensors.

Dynamic - Less sensitive and better in loud enviroments, tough & hard to break, don’t require external power, tend to be cheaper. They’re absolutely the more convenient of the two. You see these a lot in live music and public speaking events.

Condensor - Very sensitive to details and better in controlled enviroments, more delicate, requires phantom power, prices run from a few hundred dollars to five-figures.

For basic podcast needs, please do not buy a $1,000+ condensor. Really no need unless you want to use it to record music where the coloration of high end mic is helpful. $500 max is all you need,

If you want to shop for mics yourself, now your know the variables to look at.

Recommended Mics

Shure SM58 or SM57. They’re the same mic with a different filter in from They’re everywhere. Every concert you’ve ever seen has one of these somewhere. Can be made to sound great if you know what you’re doing. Very very rugged. You could literally use it as a small hammer and it will still work.

They cost $100. If you want to keep this as simple as possible, this is a great choice. Also a good choice if you’re doing something like interviewing people on the street or covering a live event. The rejection of outside noise is good enough and tough as nails. If you drop it on concrete or something it will be fine.

Shure SM7B. $400. This is the one you see in every podcast. You know the sound. Its actually a dynamic mic, but has some of the desirable qualities of a condensor. One thing to note is you will need to drive this with quite a bit of preamp gain (the thing you plug your mic into). If you buy it and crank the level only to find its still too quiet, you might want to buy a device to boost the level. Many people like the Cloudlifter CL-1 ($150) for this. Whether you need it depends on your preamp and interface. More expensive interfaces have much more clean gain, cheaper ones tend to have less or might be noisy.

Audio-Technica AT2035. Reasonably priced and gets you the condensor sound. Keep in mind you will need a preamp/interface setup that has phantom power because the mechanism in a condensor functions differently than dynamic mics. I recommend a pop filter with this one.

Blue Yeti USB Mic. I like these because they don’t require an interface. There is one built in. All the other mics here use a 3 pin XLR connector that connects to a preamp & interface box which converts the analog signal to a digital one to get it into your computer. This mic just plugs into your computer over USB with the self contained interface. I wouldn’t use this for a setup with 2-4 mics or in the field, but for one person talking in a quiet room, it sounds great.

**Sennheiser MKE 600 Shotgun Mic. Including this for special cases only. Lots of people Google “best mic for video” and get one of these because they don’t know what they’re buying. Really great mic, but for certain uses. Shotgun mics are designed to have a very tight polar pattern that rejects whatever it isn’t pointed directly at. I’d use this if I needed a camera mounted mic in a noisy environment where handhelds where not practical for whatever reason.

There are a zillion other options too, but now you should at least be able to make an informed choice.

Interfaces and Recorders

Once you have a mic, you will need an audio interface to plug your mic into, which then connects to your computer. Usually over USB, but some use CAT5 cables these days.

Any microphone will also need it’s own preamp. Interfaces usually have a few built in. The signal in a microphone is very small and a preamp is basically a special type of amplifier used to get this signal up to a workable level.

Focusrite makes solid options for podcasting. If you want to run up to 4 mics and have extra channels to spare the Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 is a good option. If you need a smaller setup with 1 or 2 mics, the smaller Scarlett 2i2 works.

Another great option is the Zoom H4n Pro 4-Track Portable Recorder. It has an audio interface, two mic inputs, two built in condensor mics, and functions as a standalone recorder. They also make several variations with additional inputs so you can record without a computer then dump the files later. Great for traveling.

Headphones

Doesn’t have to be anything crazy, you just need everyone involved to hear themselves and for you to edit in. Earbuds can even work in a pinch.

If you want a recommendation, I like the Sennheiser HD 280.

Boring Stuff

Expensive cables are mostly a ripoff. Don’t believe any of the grift about gold plated connectors or whatever. Gun to your head, you won’t hear a difference. Just avoid molded ends if possible.

Good hardware is worth the expense and you generally get what you pay for. On-Stage Stands brand stands are horrible. They break easily and are flimsy. Good for situations where you know things will get broken anyway because they’re cheap crap.

K&M is much more expensive, but you’re getting a superior product in most cases. Little things like a mic stand being weighted correctly so its harder to knock over or screws not stripping so easily just make life better.

If you will only be recording yourself, you can just plug a pair of headphones into the output of your interface and you’re good to go. If you plan on recording yourself with a few guests, you will need at the least a splitter adapter for each set of headphones. If you plan to do more than that, you will need to pick up a headphone amplifier to drive the output. Most cheap options will get that job done adequately.

Software

You’re going to need some software to record and/or edit with. These are called Digital Audio Workstations or DAWs.

There are many options, I’m just going to give you the ones I like. Lots of people seem to use Audacity because it’s free, which is fine. It’s just clunky to use and none of the effects are going to wow you, at least from what I’ve heard. I don’t personally use it.

If you’re on Mac, Logic Pro is great and reasonably priced. Has everything you need built into the DAW for the most part. If you want free on Mac, GarageBand is pre-installed.

Studio One Prime is also a great free option with basic plugins to get you started. No track limit which is a common barrier with free DAWs. Mac or Windows. You can’t use 3rd part effects with this which is a bummer, but it has enough to get you started.

Biggest power to price ratio is Reaper. It’s kind of autismo to setup and use, but highly customizable and a basic license is $60.

I would avoid Ableton, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Cubase, and the other higher price DAWs. They’re overkill unless you’re doing more intense audio work like music, scoring, etc.

The main features we need for getting clean audio are multitrack recording and clip editing, as well as some basic effects. We really need a good EQ and Compressor, but having a dedicated De-Esser, Noise Gate, Limiter, and possibly a Multiband compressor are also a big help. These are common features with many 3rd party options so not a big ask.

This setup will allow you to have a conversation between 1-4 people as well as layer in some intro & outro music if you wish and keep everything well mixed.

Post continued in Part 2

Who should do this

There’s a wide spread of people in the BowTied Jungle. Everyone from very wealthy, already made it people to young people wrapping up high school and trying to figure out what to do for their career. And many somewhere between.

This post is geared more for people just starting out or people stuck in some W2 job that isn’t working out for them.

If you’re already in a well paying career that’s a good fit for your talents, skip this and build your Wifi money. If you’re already rich, this one probably isn’t for you.

One exception: If you have aspirations to build a service based business, it could make sense for you to start out as a freelancer, then hire and scale as you bring in more business and grow. For example if you have strong coding chops, but hate working for The Man, you can start by taking freelance coding gigs, hire help as needed and eventually work up to opening your own dev shop.

Why I’m mentioning this

I’ve been a freelancer most of my adult life so this is everything here is coming from experience. There is certainly a right way and a wrong way to do this.

I’ve done both. Things are awesome now. Have a few solid clients and making great money.

In the past I’ve been so broke I couldn’t pay the electric bill, living in “the cockroach apartment” as I’ve explained on Twitter.

Hopefully I can save you some time and make sure you start this off on the right foot.

Eat what you kill

Working for myself always was appealing. No part of me ever wanted to take orders from people I don’t respect, even if I’m being paid to do so.

I’ve worked various jobs over the years whenever I had to, both white collar and blue. Moving companies, construction, admin, and even sales. If you have to do this too, fine, but keep your eyes on the prize and don’t get stuck there.

I was able to force myself through it, but I felt dead inside because I knew this wasn’t a good fit for my personality. If I was making more money or had more freedom, I could have sucked it up but that just wasn’t the situation. I was also pretty clueless back then about how you get into a high-paying career like tech or finance.

I legitimately thought those were only careers for genius-level smart people, children of rich folks, and Ivy-League grads.

Being self-employed offers a significantly higher amount of flexibility but you can’t phone in any work. Takes a certain kind of person. You can’t just hang out and have a slow day then still collect a check. You are paid to produce. If you don’t produce, you don’t get paid. Got sick and can’t work this week? Hope you saved some money to smooth that drop in income over. Your spouse wants to sleep in, order takeout and watch Netflix for 4 hours this Saturday? No rest for the wicked.

In addition to eating what you kill, you also WILL need to learn to hunt new beasts from time to time. Industries change. New technology makes old ones obsolete. In the video world, what used to take a semi truck full of broadcast hardware can now be accomplished with a laptop and a 16 space hardware rack. It’s your responsibility to keep your skills current and pick up new ones as you spot demand.

Structuring Your Time

Especially if you’re doing work that is asynchronous, you can adopt whatever bizarro schedule you like. There is no boss telling you when to show up, what to wear, how long you have to eat lunch, or what your work environment should look like.

This doesn’t mean you blob out and do whatever you want.

All that matters is the demands of your clients. If you’re on the west coast and the only time your east coast client can meet is 8:30AM their time, set your alarm now.

If you’re the type to fuck off and get distracted by YouTube videos when the boss isn’t supervising you, this life might not be for you. It’s 100% on you to structure your time and figure out the most efficient ways for you to deliver things.

You also need to track your time on projects to figure out what work is most profitable and what isn’t worth your time.

Personally, I can say there are some projects in the Jungle I won’t take anymore and other things I’m actively investing in because the margins are stronger. As far as schedule, my best hours are beginning about 1 hour from waking up until I need to eat, then late afternoon to late. Sometimes very late.

Don’t listen to all the influencer crap about waking up at X time being most productive. That’s for wannabe people. There’s no magical golden hour of productivity for everybody.

What really matters beyond client demands are simply what’s most efficient and you need to figure this out yourself. I’ve always been more of a night guy and I like to do certain things off peak hours to avoid hoards of 9-5 people so I structure things around that.

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Taxes

Working for yourself will force you to think about taxes from a business owner’s point of view right away and you get to enjoy some of those advantages immediately.

You can’t deduct miles driven for work, a home office, supplies, new computer purchases, or anything else at your W2. If you’re doing the exact same work for your own operation, you can.

The other thing is the act of paying taxes hurts a lot more so you care about tax advantages a lot more. Why? At your job someone else takes you tax payments out of your earnings, then you get a check for the rest. Feels like the tax never even happened. Your tax refund feels like a fun bonus because you never actually had the money in your hand. People talk about it very openly in this way.

Working for yourself, you get gross payments and have to have the discipline to take out money for taxes every quarter. Lots of people say they are intimidated by having to manage taxes, but in reality it’s not hard once you get the hang of Quickbooks and find a decent accountant.

That actual awful part is having to cut a check every quarter of your hard earned money, then go out and drive over 6 year old potholes the size of a Koi pond and watch public officials blatantly lie to the people paying their salaries. Everybody pays, but it hurts more when you’re holding the money upfront instead of it never hitting your account to begin with.

Brain Damage

When I talk about being brain damaged from working for yourself, I’m referring to the shift in how you view working life.

If things get really slow or you fall on your face and have to go back to working a W2 for a little while (like I did at one point) you will feel like a complete moron the entire time. Having to do some busy work to make your boss happy makes you feel like you’re back in the 5th grade raising your hand to ask for permission to use the bathroom.

The inefficiencies, obvious mistakes, and pointless interactions will grind your gears. I found myself chewing the inside of my cheeks every time a co-worker wanted to invade my lunch and make small talk because I ordered Korean food and he wanted to tell me all about how he knows what bibimbap is. Cool story, Ryan.

Freelancing for even a few months rearranges your head. Once you see it’s possible, the magic glasses are stuck to your face forever. Congratulations, your brain is now broken.

I went back to the office years ago initially optimistic.

“hey maybe this will make me more balanced”

Had it in my head that I could just work a day job, pursue my hobbies in my free time, then live a normie life like regular people. Pure fantasy. Had to learn the hard way I’m not built for normie life.

Lasted a few months. After work I started putting up flyers and dropping business cards every place that would let me to find some tutoring clients. Not my favorite thing to do, but pays well enough that I could match my paycheck in half the time while I got other things up and running. I’d spend time at my desk pricing out life in terms of clients.

Rent costs X number of clients, food costs Y clients, etc.

I probably should have built up more of a client base before I quit, but brain damage was already done. I figured if I had 80% of life paid for by working on this in off hours, but could probably get to 150% fairly quickly if I focused on that all day.

Took the leap and it basically worked. Wasn’t always pretty, but I got out and stayed out. Wasn’t until early COVID times that I really got my priorities straight though.

Same deal now that I’ve leveled up from work I don’t do anymore. Once you see what your capable of, going backwards is excruciating. If I have to go back to writing cheap sync music to eat, will probably play out like a lump of sodium in water.

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Don’t repeat my mistakes

Speaking of screwing up, if you do this right it shouldn’t happen to you. My main mistake was drinking the “follow your passion” Kool-Aid for too long.

I’ve mentioned I have a music background and I spent far too long trying to make creative work and fund it with lower hanging fruit like writing TV and web sync music. Or doing things like playing in wedding bands and dive bars. Or thinking that prestige leads to income.

I was watching margins compress well before COVID, then you know what happened next with the money supply. Rates stay the same while everything else gets more expensive. Meanwhile guys I used to be jealous of because they release music on cool person record labels and win industry awards are still living with roommates in some cases.

You want to jump into your freelance work and be paid well right away. Don’t “follow your dream”. Follow the money. Don’t sell your passions. Identify your transferrable skills & talents (BowTiedBull outlines what these are) and apply those to something with a clear demand.

You don’t necessarily need to jump into something you’re going to do forever. Get started somewhere, then pivot later if necessary. Think about what you can get up and running today. That’s where you start.

Doesn’t have to be glamorous. Don’t over think this. Even if you know the service will be obsolete in 5 years, demand today is still demand you can tap into.

In 2023 with Wordpress and Squarespace and Wix and all the rest, people are still paying me good rates to do fairly basic web design work. Even with AI image generation, there is still money to be made doing graphic design work. You can then roll that experience into something more specialized with better margins later as you learn.

Maybe you start doing some web design or fixing Wordpress sites for not thrilling amounts of money just to get some portfolio pieces up, but then work your way into web3 and smart contract work.

For example, I did commercial composing for a while in tandem with video production work (mostly live events and streaming gigs).

Now that I see margins are way better doing motion graphics and 3D work and my newbie coding skills dovetail nicely into that, that’s where I’m focused. My music work also gives me an edge with the audio portion of this so it’s a no brainer for me.

Similarly, I learned to film events with a guy who’s more suited to working in the field for personality reasons. He hates editing and being at a computer all day. He now works very regularly as a Steadicam operator and has a pretty ridiculous collection of lenses, hardware, and cameras. Same equation at the heart of it. More specialized skills and gear + demand = higher day rates.

Side Note: Weirdly once I stopped trying in music and just did whatever I wanted, some wild commission opportunities came in. Invoices in the $5-10K range. I would have eaten my hat in broad daylight for something like that years ago. The math of life is just like that for some reason.

Questions?

I’m happy to advise if someone has specific questions on this. Will go into as much detail as I can, but I don’t have experience will everything and a million things can qualify as “freelancing”.

Everything from teaching piano lessons to coding to painting houses to baking fancy cakes.

FYI:

We can define freelance work as working for yourself in something not saleable.

For example, if you build an affiliate site on your own that makes money, you are not freelancing. You are a soloprenuer because you can sell that website, whereas if you are a graphic designer doing client work, you can’t sell your self-employed design career. The skills have value that you could apply to a business, but they don’t have equity you can sell in a marketplace.

“Solopreneur” operations are different and something where I’m very much actively learning so I can’t speak as authoritatively there just yet.

Tamarin here. This week BowTiedCoquito offered to put together a guest post on scaling content.

The point of the post is to get you thinking about how to scale without completely faceplanting or defaulting to what I will refer to as M.E.R.C.

Minimum

Effort

Required

Content

Yes, publishing more is generally better than publishing less, however it’s really easy to burn yourself or your bank account out doing this. It’s a lot of work and as Coquito points out in the post below, this is work on top of whatever it is you actually do in the business.

The MERC trap is where you let quality slide in favor of volume because after trying to do both, you end up sleeping 3 hours a night.

Asking, “whats the minimum I have to do to in order for the needle to move?" then working backwards from there seems logical, right?

Knowing this is good information of course, but you don’t want to default to the MERC all the time because that’s all you can sustain. Its weak first of all and when things really get tough, you will fall below the minimum and start to publish genuine garbage. Or you fall off the wagon completely.

You should experiment with MERC content, but also establish what your boundary is on the other side as well. What does high effort content look like for you? What’s your maximum? How do you scale that up?

I’ve certainly found that writing blog articles for my websites with more “spider food” like audio clips, videos, images, etc takes significantly longer to do well, but these article also tend to perform better.

Do you gain any efficiency by doing more of the high effort stuff that affects your MERC? For example, if you have the skills to edit a very clean, high production value video, you will have the chops and resources to throw together a couple memes pretty quickly if you’re having a hectic day but just want to get something out. Or maybe you can train/hire people to do this while you focus on the high end.

I’m a big believer that in order to scale content production, you need to have an understanding of both those boundaries. You might find that publishing less, but only high effort content performs better. So you focus on than and farm out the simpler MERC work to VAs.

With that said, by the end of this you should be thinking about what your scaling system will look like for your various tiers of content.

I’ll let Coquito take it from here.

Dear reader,

Most content marketers struggle with scaling their content.

They’re too short-sighted, so they work on one really good blog. Or one really good Twitter thread. And then what? 

They’re either blocked with a lack of ideas, or they become demotivated when their content doesn’t attract buyers or go viral.

This mentality puts the pressure on coming up with more and more ideas to scale your content and expand your audience. 

It makes you fall victim to Bland Content Syndrome, where you face three symptoms:

• Spinning Wheels—making more and more content but getting nowhere.

• Empty Jar Trap—like a coin in an empty jar, makes lots of noise but holds no value

• POV Blindness—you never develop a unique POV that distinguishes you

If the above symptoms and challenges sound familiar to you, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

I can speak on this, and help you out of it, because I have also found myself in this rut. 

The good news is the best way to scale your content marketing is quite easy.

Rather than trying to come up with more and more ideas, take the time to frontload your content ideation and production. 

Front loading your ideation is all about taking the time to stretch out one idea ten different ways, rather than committing to ten different ideas in one way. 

This then sets you up to frontload your content production, too. Once you have a big content idea, it’s far easier to think of ten, twenty, or thirty ways of repurposing that. Especially when compared to thinking of thirty different net-new ideas.

This is what I call the Level Up Method:

• Identify your niche, topic, or subtopic

• Ideate a specific asset to create

• Level Up one or two notches (from blog to blog series, or blog series to a report)

• Plan how to repurpose that asset in tens and tens of ways

• Begin production and distribution 

I’m saying the same thing in as many ways possible right now so you can hopefully see it’s simplicity and impact. 

And if this seems plainly obvious to you, I agree. But ask yourself this: are you doing it? The answer is likely no.

Another way to think about front loading your content creation is to consider the power of the Content Clustering Model.

This visual helps illustrate why thinking of a big idea, or taking your current idea and Leveling Up, is a sure way to scale your content marketing.

Take a look:

I spoke extensively about the power of content clustering a few weeks ago, but the TL;DR is: content clustering is more efficient and effective at both scaling your content marketing and expanding your distribution, which means more eyeballs on your content.

Let’s further illustrate these points with example scenarios.

Disclaimer: This is a completely hypothetical situation, I’m just using a good fren to illustrate my point.

Level Up Method Hypothetical Use Case - BowTiedFarmer

Let’s illustrate the power of the Level Up Method by using BowTiedFarmer as an example. 

Overview:

• BowTiedFarmer’s a small business owner who sells honey and other organic goods at bowtiedfarmer.com

• He’s got 7.6K followers on Twitter, 221 on Instagram, 159 on TikTok, and 47 on YouTube

• And, I assume, he manages both content ideation, creation, and delivery on his own—likely while balancing actual farm work, too

This sounds all too familiar to other small business owners managing their own content marketing. It’s a lot for one or two people to take on. Making content ideation a huge stressor.

Problem:

• He wants to continue to expand his audience and sell more products

• He knows he needs to create more content to drive website traffic and brand awareness

• Yet he can’t constantly think of net-new content ideas all the time, let alone execute them

This isn’t a challenge for small business owners only, but for content marketers everywhere. Why? Because they fall into a trap thinking the answer to scalability is more and more content ideas. Instead of slowing down and thinking bigger…or Leveling Up.

Solution:

Let’s say he wants to write about the health benefits of honey.

Well, if he’s like most content marketers he might decide this is a great topic for a blog post. Maybe a few social media posts, too. 

Great. There’s only one problem; once he posts them, the content ends. And now he has to think of another idea to keep producing more content. See how that’s problematic? Especially for someone with minimal time?

It puts the pressure on him to continue to think of more and more ideas. Forcing him to spin his wheels with little upside. 

He’ll feel like he’s working hard on content marketing, but the results won’t be worth it.

Let’s Level Up his honey health benefits blog idea. Instead:

• Can he write a series of blogs? 

• Can he write a long-form digital report/ebook? 

• Can he produce a 3-5 minute YouTube video explaining the top benefits of his honey?

Suddenly, he’s taking one idea and stretching it out. And let’s see he decides to write a long-form digital report, instead of a single blog. 

Now he can:

• Publish this long-form digital report 

  • Ideally this is a web-based asset for SEO purposes, but it can be a gated PDF, too

• Publish 6-10 short-form blogs 

  • Ideally these blogs use the same research and premises for writing the digital report, and all backlink to it for SEO purposes

• Publish 12-20 snippet videos

  • Ideally these snippet videos take one point, or even sub point!, and share the same concepts in a different medium

• Publish 24-40 social media posts

  • Ideally you’re throwing in a mix of links to your posts, net-new posts, and focusing on one or two social media platforms

Another benefit of using the Level Up Method is it stops you from doing non-work.

Constantly thinking about more and more ideas is non-work because half the time you don’t even take them through content creation, let alone posting. It’s a waste of time.

Instead, Leveling Up your ideas to go bigger, first, sets you up to do the real work of writing, producing, and publishing lots of content at a time. It’s more efficient and effective.

Plus, it puts the pressure on flushing out one idea and chopping it up in unique ways, rather than continuously thinking of new ideas.

Do you see the power of the Level Up Method? 

It’s so easy to use, but when we’re hit from all angles everyday, it’s also easy to forget to use it. 

We kid ourselves into thinking creating more and more ideas is a better way to create content, as opposed to flushing out one idea at a time and seeing how much content you can make from it.

Conclusion

There are many ways to scale your content marketing. Yet this is the simplest, easiest, and fastest way to do it. 

It negates the concept that to scale your content, you must ideate new ideas and create rapid fire content over and over again.

Instead, it empowers you to front-load your work. Think bigger, and create more content faster, easier, and with far more impact.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Thank you, Tamarin, for all you do. And for doing a blog swap with me. The work you do matters. Video matters. And it’s great to witness your growth.

P.P.S. Go buy BowTiedFarmer’s honey right now.

BowTiedCoquito is putting the soul back in content and making you a better marketer. Coquito writes about content marketing on his Twitter and his Substack, Content Captains.