Improving Your Content Skills: High Level Overview
Improving Your Content Skills: High Level Overview
How to structure your learning.
Hello Anon! Busy day in the treetop and a lot of my own learning to do, so today instead of focusing on a specific technical guide we’re going to zoom out and break down how to improve your content skills at a high level.
I get a fair amount of DMs asking fairly vague questions like “how do I learn video”, “my content sucks how do I improve” etc or what courses I recommend.
Everybody knows there’s an endless mountain of content explaining this stuff. So, I interpret these questions as either an admission of laziness (can’t help you there) or that you don’t know how to structure your learning. So I want to give you some tactics to help break the problem down and help you lay out a path to learning that isn’t so overwhelming and doesn’t require being spoonfed.
How I learned to make stuff & mistakes I made
Have honestly never taken any kind of video editing course.
I’m taking a look at one option I might recommend in the future, but if you have any recommendations feel free to let me know in the comments.
In college I had to take some really lame music technology class which basically consisted of copying scores into a now obsolete music notation software, but that’s the extent of my media training.
The main transferable skills I got out of music school were being sensitive to timing, becoming comfortable performing for large groups of people, and learning to take apart something as complicated as a symphony into much simpler, managable elements. Ever wanted to know why there’s a lot of crossover between music people and software/math? The third one is it. If you dive deep enough into music theory, you eventually end up studying math topics like Fourier transforms and set theory anyway.
I started by self-teaching a lot of audio production software like, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, & Ableton Live because of my background as a music performer. It made sense to start there and I had a lot of motivation to fight through the sticking points of learning, simply because I have a strong interest in it.
Once I had done some audio work for people, it’s pretty natural that they start to ask if you do video or know someone who does.
I don’t enjoy video production nearly as much, but the numbers are much more in your favor, simply because humans are very visual by nature. Fees are generally higher because it’s a pain to learn, you’re fighting less competition vs. audio work, and demand keeps increasing for visual content. I also have an advantage because a lot of video/film people are borderline [redacted] when it comes to sound.
I resisted this for too long and clung to passion and chased industry prestige. I learned things along the way, but this was largely a waste of time.
I tell you all this because there are two concepts you need to internalize:
Like a lot of things, you need to just start. Just find a project and make literally anything. Even if its simple, really complex impressive work always starts with relatively simple parts. Also gets you comfortable making things where you feel completely out of your element.
You don’t need a ‘passion‘ for this to be good at it. Really the only non-negotiable I can come up with is you have to be able to tolerate long hours in front of a computer and problem solve when stuff goes sideways.
Just jump in the water and try to swim
Follow a simple tutorial and see if you can get to the end. It’s going to feel like you’re just clicking random buttons with no idea what is happening. And you’d be right. You might get into something over your head and have to try something else. That’s all part of the process. Unlike actual swimming, you can’t drown. You just close the tab and search for something else.
After a bunch of these, you start to notice patterns in how things are put together. At least I did. If something doesn’t work because the tutorial is old and your software has changed since it was published, figuring out the problem will teach you a lot.
Wait, you’re supposed to learn random things until you just ‘get it’?
That’s kind of what I did to be honest, but no. Step one is to get your feet wet with a few basic things. I’ll outline a framework for you in the next section. It’s especially good if you make something that’s more than what you think you can do. It proves to you that something which impresses others can break down into simple, understandable parts. The Wizard of 0x will be percieved very differently once you’ve had a peek behind the curtain.
After you have a few simple tutorial projects, you need to find a project that isn’t completely laid out for you in Google somewhere. Force yourself to put pieces together.
This is exactly like my experience learning Javascript so far. (However, I’m here because people are beating down my door for video content.) So if you code or work with technology already, even as a visually challenged backend engineer, you probably have more chops for this than you think.
In my case these growth projects tend to be client work. People approach me with some kind of content I have no idea how to make and I get to go figure that out.
But this can easily be your own projects. Let’s take something simple that would apply to people in the Jungle. A lot of people are working on what I would call motivation-adjacent content. Unlike a lot of influencers, you actually do want people to get that WiFi business up and running, but need to grab their attention somewhere.
I’m going to use some content from Gary V as a basic example and wash my mouth out later. You might actually be able to Google how this is made, but let’s pretend you don’t find any useful guide and have to reverse engineer this.
How would we break this into pieces?
We have a basic video clip of Gary talking as our base footage. Script is done. Awesome.
We have a white title bar with text over it. How would you make that in editing software? This is an easy to look up problem. Even if you don’t know what lower or upper 3rd graphics are, you can still get there by searching “how to draw a rectangle davinci resolve” or something similar.
There are captions that line up with what Gary says. Also easily Googled topic. “how to add captions adobe premiere” etc
We need to stylize text to get the meme look. When you look up text styling, you’ll learn text generally has a “stroke” (the outline color) and a ‘fill’ component (interior color)
The upper quarter part of the video is a blurred duplicate of the base video. I’m guessing here, but good chance there was something ugly in the bottom of the frame that needed to be cropped out. But social media algos don’t like blank space in video content, they want the whole frame full. So duplicating and blurring is a common tactic to just have something going on in the blank part of the the frame.
A couple graphics pop up at key moments. You’ll need to dig around to find sources for graphics (icon8, flaticon, etc) then clean them up. You might have to invert color or apply different blending modes to remove the stock white or black graphic background for example.
The Learning Framework
I’m going to give you another way to think about breaking this down to refine your YouTube learning or course selection.
There are three types of knowledge you’re looking for:
High level creative concepts. This kind of knowledge is independent of whatever software you’re using. Storytelling techniques. Different types of camera angles. The kind of knowledge you can get from studying good TV, Films, or even YouTube channels. You’re looking for the structure and form.
Technical Topics. This is stuff you’re able to do in a lot of different software to help you realize the stuff in #1. A good example would be something like masking, color correction, blending modes, layer based editing, easing curves for graphic motion, etc. If you understand this stuff, you can pick up new software very fast because you know what you’re looking for, you just might need to look up where the button is in whatever you use.
Your software. This is just learning where the buttons are in whatever you’re using and from what I can tell, a ton of courses are overly focused on this. A really good course (that I may have to make myself, idk yet) in my opinion would be project-focused so you pick up #1 and #2 as we learn the UI and keyboard shortcuts of the software.
Being aware of which of these three things you’re lacking in can help to focus where you put your learning effort.
If all else fails…click every button and see what happens. Seriously.
This last one is kind of funny because of how blunt it is, but I have a good friend who learns new software this way.
You figure out what software is being used to make the thing you want to make. Then you go through every menu item. Literally start in the upper left corner under “File” and go through every item. Same thing for the UI. Look up whatever you don’t understand. If you have no idea why a certain feature exists, you dig around to find out why it exists which might lead to some interesting projects.
Not my style, but this guy is excellent in Photoshop, Touch Designer, and whatever else you throw at him. His full time living is touring with guys doing concert visuals, which he is an absolute monster at. This is clearly working for him and maybe you too if you share the same psycho learning gene he has.
Very Important Note
I’m currently doing free posts on Mondays. Pledge a subscription amount you feel is fair (new Substack feature!) if you’d like me to do to paid posts on top of this. If enough people do it, I’ll turn on paid subscriptions and be able to devote more time to these guides and deep dives on audiovisual content tech.
Until next week..
