- So I wanted to share with you something
that I've been doing for the last few months,
which kinda started on accident, and now,
if you happen to find yourself for some reason at home,
spending some quality time with your streaming services,
(light music)
this might be a good chance for you to try it out, as well.
If you're like me and you make a lot of videos,
it's easy to just kinda fall into your creative rut,
and it's hard to escape the way
that you just tend to approach things, develop things,
create things, and sometimes,
you need a little bit of outside inspiration.
So last year, my fiancee, Heather,
and I got pretty obsessed with anime,
which is a topic for an entirely different video,
but one of the series that we watched was Violet Evergarden
on Netflix, which is this absolutely gorgeous show.
It's a really good show,
but it's visually completely stunning and beautiful,
and one of the episodes later in the series starts
with this scene.
Should I point this way, or is that way...
With this scene.
(light music)
- [Narrator] Most of the anti-peace forces
that had invaded Ctrigall have been defeated.
(light music)
- Did you see that, right at the beginning of the scene?
(light music)
Yes, there are military officials discussing
an impending war that's been building up
for the entire series,
but did you see that map on the wall?
For some reason,
but that's the thing that stuck out to me the most,
and as a visually stunning show,
a nearly static shot of a map
on the wall jumped out like crazy, and I don't know why.
It was something about just the way that it was paste,
the way that an episode opens
with just this static object and a slow camera push into it,
mixed with the classical music of the soundtrack
and then the voiceover of the characters,
and I couldn't get it out of my brain,
and then a few months ago when I was doing my review video
for my new MacBook Pro, I was like (sighing) maybe this is
a chance to incorporate that.
So I started that video with the top down shot
of the MacBook.
I set the MacBook on the table,
and the camera slowly pushes in towards it
while my voiceover starts to explain the context
of the video.
(upbeat violin music)
There has been a lot of interesting talk
about the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
For me, I have been using the same computer
for the past six years,
so why is this the one that made me wanna upgrade,
(light music)
and then it transitions
into like a B-roll montage sequence thing,
and I love the way that video came out,
and I love the way it started,
and to try to match the tone of Violet Evergarden,
I made sure to look for like a classical style song,
which is very different than the music I would normally use
in my videos,
and that ended up being just this really fun project.
So if you watch my MacBook Pro review,
you're not gonna be like
(fingers snapping) that's an anime
because why would you?
That's completely insane,
but I, on my own, wouldn't have thought
about introducing the topic
that way and wouldn't have thought
about using that music style,
and I wouldn't have thought about just starting
a whole video that way if I hadn't seen
the beginning of that episode of Violet Evergarden.
So even though it's entirely unrelated,
it ended up having a pretty big influence
not just on that video
but on future videos, as well,
because it added another tool to my skill set
because basically what I did was I filmed that
in 4K and then added the camera push in Final Cut Pro.
So it's kind of like the image is just key framed
and scaling up so it looks like the camera's pushing in,
but nothing is really moving,
just a great use of high-resolution footage,
and then also the soundtrack, it opened up like
editing and creating videos
with classical style music is actually really fun,
and now there have been quite a few videos
in the months since then
where I've just naturally gone towards is there like
a classical style song that would work here,
and it just sort of added a different little bit
of flavor to the videos I was making just
because I saw a thing and thought it was kinda cool.
So if you watch stuff, even if it's totally unrelated
to the videos and things that you make,
you kinda never know
where that inspiration's going to come from.
Another example is we don't have cable at home,
so we tend to miss out on a lot of commercials,
but we were visiting some family last month,
and I swear I saw this commercial
for FX on Hulu like 100 times over the course of a weekend.
(intense music)
So basically, FX, the network,
put out this huge marketing campaign to announce
to its cable viewers that they are also available on Hulu,
and they have this promo that they put together for that,
which I thought was edited in such a cool way.
Again, it kinda had like sort of classical-y music,
but it was just so fast,
and the way the cuts were matching
with the mood of the music and text would pop up,
and then it had this little frame
of video covering a big frame,
and it was sorta transitioning between 'em
with these different sized frames
that were matching the rhythm of the music.
I just thought it looked really cool,
and the 400th time
that we saw that thing (chuckling)
that weekend, I told Heather this is edited really cool,
but she was like it kinda makes me dizzy
because it's so fast,
and I was like but I think it's really, really cool,
and so it just kinda stuck in my brain of (sighing)
maybe there's a way to incorporate that style
into a video at some point, and a few weeks later,
I was making a video about that probe lens,
which I really miss, and really,
I want a probe lens back again 'cause it was so great,
but I wanted to start that video
with a short little montage that showed the results
from the lens but also showed the lens being used
because it looks so crazy on the front of the camera,
and then I realized that thing I saw
from the FX ad is kinda great because the small frame
over the big frame of video could be
a great way to transition from shots
of the camera to shots from the lens and back to the camera.
So I ended up watching that ad frame by frame to see
how they were timing their cuts
and how they were using 'em to transition between clips,
and even though my little montage is
only a few seconds long,
it was heavily inspired by that,
and it worked really, really well.
(light piano music)
These are just two examples,
but I think this happens all the time if you're open to it.
As you're just observing things in the world,
you can get these ideas and these inspirations
that are going to affect your work and get you out of,
maybe break the habits that you're kinda stuck in
because, again, a network advertising itself
on a streaming service
is not where I would immediately turn
for inspiration about how to edit a montage
for a video about a probe lens for a camera.
Those two things are not related at all,
but they came together really, really well to make something
that I'm really proud of,
and then again, just building in those skill sets,
opening up my musical tastes to the idea
of some of these videos would be really cool
with classical music,
and now, that has just kinda been a thing that's been
in a lot of different videos.
Even just recently, I did my M50 versus EOS R review,
(soothing music) (wooshing)
and the whole intro to that
and the main soundtrack has kind of a classical soundtrack
because now that's one of the first places I'll go
when looking for music,
and of course, over time,
those new styles can just kinda become the creative rut,
but it's all about expanding your skill set
so that your toolkit grows and grows,
and you can pull on all these different things
whenever you need them to make stuff that stands out
and has a unique perspective and style to it,
and it's also just really fun to do.
So I highly recommend it any time you're consuming any media
to just be open to inspiration,
but especially if you find yourself
with a little extra time consuming extra amounts
of media lately,
it's a great way to sort of spend that time,
and some of you might know
that I'm a high school digital media teacher,
and currently, we're out of school on a break,
and so I've been posting videos to my classes online
to kinda keep things going a little bit,
and every day in class, I always end with a joke of the day,
and since I've been posting these videos online, I decided,
just to keep things kinda consistent,
I should put a joke of the day in the video,
which has been really kinda fun and goofy,
and then I thought,
speaking of inspiration from other sources,
what if I ended my YouTube videos
with a really dumb, cheesy joke of the day?
I think that's probably a pretty great idea.
So with that in mind,
do you know what you call an unpredictable photographer?
A loose Canon.
(laughing)
(upbeat music)
♪ No, no no ♪
(upbeat music)