0:39
The first frame of short-form video is your only thumbnail. Keep it simple with high contrast and saturation, use VFX tricks like fake fire on a restaurant sign to make it pop, and expect viewers to believe the effects are real.
The first frame of short-form video is your only thumbnail. Keep it simple with high contrast and saturation, use VFX tricks like fake fire on a restaurant sign to make it pop, and expect viewers to believe the effects are real.
With short form, there's no thumbnail and people aren't really reading the title. What's your philosophy on what to put on screen, what that first frame should look like?
I try to keep it as simple as possible. It's very similar philosophy to like a title and thumbnail, same psychology in a way where I try to keep it little to no focus points, high brightness, high saturation. We'll go through so many lengths and measures and After Effects and VFX just to make it pop out just that much more. Sometimes we'll add artificial fire just to make it look crazier. In one of our shorts, I went to Hell's Kitchen, but you don't really get get that message across unless you actually add the restaurant on fire.
And it's like something as little as that, pointing up at the logo of the restaurant, it looks like there's a fire. Is that not real?
That's not real. That's not real.
People think it's real.
We try to make things really stand out. Even with the secret room, when I first hit the wall, I just dented the wall. I didn't even break a hole. And we actually had to make a VFX where it would look like I made this giant hole, when in reality it wasn't a giant hole that broke. It was like a little teeny tiny hole because I had like a little small hammer.
