(upbeat music)
- Good morning, welcome to a new vlog.
I have just made my daily morning coffee
but I thought that I would spare you
the coffee montage this time
because you've seen it in the past two vlogs
and I'm pretty sure you know how I make my coffee by now.
It is Friday and it has been a surprisingly good week.
Monday was a little off, as has been usual lately,
but every other day this week has been surprisingly good,
much better than past weeks have been,
if you watched the last vlog you'll know I've been
struggling with motivation and focus
and yeah, maybe it's just that we're in week three,
maybe four, I can't remember,
of the lockdown now,
and I guess I'm slowly getting used to this new normal.
But I'm not reading the news every day
and looking at the World Health Organization
status reports every day like I was doing previously,
feeling like I needed to be knowing everything
that was going on.
Now I feel like there's nothing more I can personally do,
than staying home.
Obey the rules of the lockdown,
stay home, wash my hands when I do go out
to the supermarket etc etra.
So, what's the point in making myself stressed out
and more anxious by trying to keep up to date
about all these numbers and all of that.
I know I'm gonna have some people in the comments
saying that I'm sticking my head in the sand
or something for saying that but,
you gotta do what you gotta do to survive,
and I've felt a lot better this week
for having not read the news all the time
and kept up with that.
So I don't know, if you're feeling that way too
maybe give yourself a mission to just ignore it
for a little bit and try and live your new normal
version of life we've got going on.
Wow, that was a ramble, wasn't it?
What have I got going on today?
So, I got up early today, which is another thing I think
that's been helping this week,
is I've been tryna get up earlier
and trying to not, when I do wake up
spend half an hour scrolling my phone in bed.
Now it seems pretty obvious,
it's the number one advice people give you for productivity
and how to have a good morning,
it's just really hard to follow sometimes, you know?
I got up today about 7.30 and I've actually spent
the past hour and a half doing my accounting,
so that's not super fun but I don't know,
it does feel good to be taking care of the health
of my business.
Just like I'm tryna take care of health in all other aspects
of life, you know?
So yeah, that's good, that's done.
Got some things sorted and now I can ignore it again
for a little while longer.
Today, for work, that I'm about to get into now,
I've been working on creating a Gif,
which, I mean that sentence sounds ridiculous
when you think about the amount of time I've spent on it.
Yeah, I've spent about three and a half hours
yesterday making this thing, let me show you
what it's looking like.
It's this Gif here that is meant to show
how our landing pages tool works.
And it's gonna be super small and short
to be embedded in an email.
Yeah, I'm really happy with how it's turning out though,
I think this is gonna be really cool.
I just have a few adjustments to make
like, can you see the shadow around that
is all weird?
So I'm just gonna remove the shadow from the template,
and also, I was asked to add color to these initial
ones so they're not so gray.
I've been getting back into using After Effects for it.
So I'm gonna make some edits and let's see
if I can make this thing a little bit better.
(uplifting music)
It is so nice and sunny today.
Wow, that is bright, isn't it?
It has been really cloudy, gray, rainy
for the past few weeks, just small dose of sunshine,
and even though really I wouldn't be going outside
in the rain anyway, it has made me feel a lot more
trapped inside throughout this lockdown.
Just not being able to be out, feel the sun on your skin,
breath fresh air.
I feel very lucky that we have this lovely terrace,
to spend time and be outside, you know?
'Cause that's more than a lot of people have
in Spain right now.
So, very, very grateful for that.
I just ate lunch out there but before I get on
with my afternoon work session,
let's wait for the camera to realize we're inside,
there we go,
I wanna show you the Gif that I've made.
I think it's final,
I sent it to Nathan, he said he liked it,
and I'm pretty happy with it too.
I think that it'll come in handy for other things as well,
so this is the final Gif.
So, wait up, let's start from the beginning.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Okay, so three templates come in.
There's blue in them now.
Then it clicks on it and it does all this again.
I had to rerecord it all though because of the background
changing color so yeah, it's been simplified a little bit
and had a bit more color put into these early stages.
I thought that I would just show you quickly
a little bit of how I made this,
in case you were interested.
You can skip ahead if you're not.
So these first two templates here are just mock ups
that I didn't think that they were based on
actual designs of actual (mumbles) landing page templates
but yeah, just for Simple City,
I mock them up (mumbles).
And then this one that slides in is actually
a screen recording within the app itself
so I just changed the colors of the base template
to match what I was doing here with these ones,
you know, bringing in the blue.
So it's a screen recording with a mask around it
to make it the same size as the other images,
so it just looks like another one of them.
Then, sorry if you can hear the outside right now,
I'm just liking having the door open.
This cursor just slides in and it clicks
and this shrinks down a little bit to look like
it's been pressed.
And then I expanded the mask so that the template fills
the screen and all of this is literally just done,
if you look down here, with Keyframe Animation,
in After Effects, just like moving the position
of the scale, or whatever
and everything has a motion blur on it
because I read advice, I think it was in a post
that Baremetrics team did,
it was Baremetrics or in Vision,
but if you put motion blur in a Gif,
when you drop frames to make the file size smaller,
it just all looks a lot smoother,
so yeah, I did that.
So this expands and then all this text
writing at the same time.
That is just me recording the screen while I edited it all,
then you can see down here
there's all these different layers
and that's because I've just chopped up the file
and moved the pieces over
and masked the bit that it's editing at that exact moment.
So that it looks like they're all happening
at one time even though, obviously I did them
one after the other when I was actually editing it.
Then, what happens next?
Okay, this is just a photo slides in
and then scales up a little bit
and then it just cuts to the photo being
in the template.
But the idea is that it looks like the photo comes in
and fills in the space right?
And I don't know, when it happens faster,
I think it looks okay.
Then, this is the color picker that in the actual app,
sits to the side here,
so I just cut that off.
This is another masked screen recording,
right and brought that in, set it on top
so that you can actually see what's happening
while the color gets edited and yeah,
then it slides out again
and that is our finished landing page.
I also played with Time Room Mapping
throughout all of this just to make things,
especially the typing, happen faster.
I'm really pleased with that.
It turned out how I wanted.
You know when you get an idea and you're like,
I feel like this is gonna work
and I feel like I have the skills to make it happen,
but I'm not sure,
that is what happened and I'm glad that it turned out
that I did know how to do that,
so that's good.
Nice to end the week on a win like that, you know?
This afternoon I have a few meetings
but I'm also gonna spend time reflecting
on the last quarter.
It's April now and so we're into Q2, in business speak,
and yeah, it's time to reflect on how the last quarter
went and set some goals for the up coming one.
So that's what I'm gonna do.
Got a cup of tea with a stroopwaffle,
sitting on top of it, getting all nice and melty
on the inside.
And let's get to work for the afternoon.
(uplifting music)
All right, I just finished up my calls for the day.
I had a really good hour long stand up
with Corey, the developer that I work with,
I always say that when I say his name,
can we just all agree that you know who Corey is by now
and I can stop saying that and just say Corey?
He has a YouTube channel of his own by the way,
so I'm gonna link it down below in the description
if you wanna go and check that out.
We went over a review of the first quarter
and yeah, what we felt worked well and what we wanna work on
coming up so that was really good
and I feel like I'm in a good spot to end the work day
and yeah, it's been a good week.
It's been a much better week that I've had.
I don't know since when.
Yeah, just way more focused this week,
got way more done so that's good,
and now, I'm going to start my weekend,
which is mostly going to consist of me
playing Animal Crossing on my Switch
and so I thought it might be fun to end this vlog
by showing you a little bit around my Animal Crossing Island
if you're into that, if you're not then you can end the vlog
here if you like, I don't mind.
Thank you for watching up to this point,
I appreciate that not everyone is as interested
in Animal Crossing as I am,
and I appreciate you watching up to this point anyway,
so thank you and hope you have a good week.
But for all the rest of you,
let me show you my island.
So, this is my little character,
of course I splurged for the extra hair colors things,
so that I can have purple hair.
My house is not super cute right now
but I have this huge rug, which matches the one
in my office and I have a desk, a random floor lamp.
I think what I'm tryna do is I'm tryna have lots
of plants so, there actually used to be a lot more
hanging on the walls.
One like I think I still have in my bedroom.
My house only has two rooms, currently.
Yeah, okay, so see this potted ivy hanging up there,
that was my hot item yesterday,
so I got lots of money for selling them
so I took some off my walls
but yeah, this cute plant and then I have this cute plant
and this cute plant.
I just wanna fill the place with plants if possible,
and I'm working on making these rooms into something
proper and less mismatched.
I got this random chair out of the,
I don't know I think it came out of balloon one day,
or something like that.
Please ignore all the stuff that I have just sitting
on the ground because I couldn't be bothered
to go inside to put in storage the other day.
But this is my little yard,
I have, oh there's a guy selling rugs, cool.
My crafting station over here with a tool box,
then I've got this cute little swing that I can sit on.
So that's fun, Tiki torches on either side.
I have a lawn mower, which is also pretty cool.
Little table and chairs over here,
this is my fire pit area, near the sea
which I think is really cute,
and then this is my flower garden.
I've seen people do really cool things
with flowers, where they'll have
all the different colors together
and it'll line the fence, which I think is cool.
So I think I'm gonna try do something similar to that.
I have my shop right here,
by my house so that I can get to it really quickly,
what's the hot item today, let me see.
Oops!
Then I have my town square plaza, of course.
You see some of my villages too,
my little airport.
Then I have my villages scattered around
the rest of the place and then (mumbles),
excellent things to pick right now.
I just love this game so much,
it's super cute and it's been making me feel
pretty happy lately and it's a good distraction
from the world and so,
I'm gonna go play this a bunch.
I hope you enjoyed seeing my house
and where I'm up to.
We gotta do things that make us happy at the moment
and this is definitely something
that's been making me happy.
I hope you can spend some time doing whatever it is
that's making you happy these days, this weekend as well.
Hope you have a good one,
I hope you've had a good week.
Thanks for watching the vlog,
give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed it
and I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.
(uplifting music)