as i've advanced in my creative career i've expanded my toolkit in a lot of ways
many of these tools are exactly what you would expect from a cinematographer for example back
when i first started i was using a simple canon dslr and just recently i was able to purchase
a fully kitted out red cinema camera for my work i've got a ton of audio and lighting equipment
everything i need to make my production quality as high as i possibly can but then there are some
tools that i love but i honestly never thought i would really be excited about like this now i
i know what you're thinking ryan that's a tripod i've had many tripods all of which had three legs
and could plenty well get the job done but this one has better legs and it does the job better
i don't know there's not really a sexy way to explain how good a tripod is anyways there's one
tool that i picked up a couple of years ago that i really found myself using a lot more lately as
my schedule has gotten more complex i've been working with more clients i've been traveling more
really scaling up in every aspect of my career and that tool is canva i've been using it for
a ton of different things for a while now but one of the things that has really impressed me is how
relevant it seemed to stay in my workflow as we grow in our field work on bigger better projects
oftentimes we upgrade our gear or our tools and with canva i've actually kind of done
the opposite the workload is quickly stacking up and i found myself using a lot of canvas features
more often this is especially thanks to the fact that they continue to keep
adding features that make creators lives easier the amount of things you can do inside of here is
kind of insane and honestly it can be a little bit overwhelming if you're just getting started so
in today's video i want to take you guys through three ways that i use canva regularly to
speed up and enhance my workflow as a creative professional all right so sit back get comfy
let's talk about canva one of my favorite things to post on social media on instagram
are these cinematic frame stacks i've shared these with you guys before being a filmmaker
in a lot of ways instagram isn't very friendly to the whole wide screen format stacking three
wide screen shots on top of one another in a four by five canvas can give you a really unique and
interesting look and gives you a way to better share that cinema minded composition and style on
instagram now for something like this compositing a few images together i think a lot of people
would think to jump over to photoshop but canva can make this process insanely fast and simple by
utilizing templates so what i've gone ahead and done is actually created a template already for
this process all this is is a 4x5 composition ready to go for posting on instagram and what
i've done is i've put three shapes inside of here and formatted them to evenly divide vertically by
three now of course we're gonna need some stills from our video to put in here all we need to do
is tap one of these squares hit replace and then we'll scroll through and find some frames that we
want to use these frames were from a nike shoot just a few weeks ago that i was the director of
photography on pretty cool look pretty happy with the way this whole thing turned out now one thing
that might begin happening as you start resizing the images to better fit the composition is you
might go over that evenly divided third line so really simply i can just kind of slide between
the two images and reference the other black and white lines to make sure that it's all still level
there we go something like that and now if i want to create another stack i can literally just
slide over and begin replacing more of these little squares and i've gone ahead and made
this template available for you guys to download so if you want to do this same thing right now
just go sign up for canva for free and you can use the template on to the next let's talk thumbnails
honestly i've got a little bit of a love hate relationship with them i'll shoot a video get
super excited about it pull an all-nighter trying to edit it finally finish hit that export button
get ready to upload it get it scheduled to go live first thing in the morning and then i'm like
i need a thumbnail watch how easy we can knock out a fairly tedious thumbnail concept in just
a few minutes let's go ahead and create a new design we'll do 4k 3840 by 2160. let's find
something i like this frame a lot this was from the project i shot for prada
this is my buddy tyler first thing let's go ahead and right click and hit set as background
image now in order to adjust the positioning we can click on the image hit crop and then
i think we'll go for something like that just kind of barely on that right third we'll hit done now
what i want to do here is i want to put some clean text on this but i think it'd be cool to have it
maybe go behind tyler and the camera normally that would require masking and i'm sure i can't be the
only one who hates masking i just i don't have the patience for it i'm not good at it watch what we
can do here let's drag the same image in and then up in the top let's hit edit image and you'll see
we have background remover this is a canva pro only feature so maybe this will convince you
and literally with one click we have a perfectly masked out subject i couldn't even do this as
good in photoshop like the edge the feathering it just it just works let's go ahead and throw
in some text canva has a ton of text presets a lot of them are really cool but i think for this
something very minimal and bold would look really cool drop this in he's shooting with the sony fx6
so let's call this the sony fx6 review let's just go ahead and drag up the size and you'll notice
at the moment the text is laying over the top of everything but if we just click on the masked out
image of tyler go up to the top right hip position and bring it forward we can just adjust the text
to fall a little bit more in the center one thing to point out here is that they do automatically
detect the color palette of the entire composition but i think white for this will probably look good
let's try some effects there's a few different things we can do here we can add a drop shadow
or we can just click lift which adds like a very very subtle soft drop shadow it's perfect
for stuff like this where you have text on a very flat background and you just need it to stand out
a tiny bit more my general rule of thumb with drop shadows in a scenario like this is that
less is more so we'll dial it pretty far back okay that's looking pretty good but i think we can take
this to another level here i think we could play with the color in this background image a little
bit make things pop a bit more so we can open the edit image go to adjust and we have all of our
adjustments here let's cool it down a little bit make it a little bit more blue
maybe desaturate it play with blur a little bit oh that's interesting because the image
underneath is getting blurred but the top image is staying the same it's kind of like glowing around
the edges that's kind of a cool effect though not gonna lie like really subtle something like that
that's pretty cool i like that considering the fact that i was able to mask and independently
adjust stuff and layer text behind something all with like just a few clicks that's pretty good
i spent a little time on instagram this morning and gotta say been really inspired to be making
reels more lately i talked a lot about reels in my seven days of content video and how they're really
cool because they can be really raw and unique and simple but i often times still find myself lately
wanting to overthink it and over perfect it so lately i've been trying to make more of an effort
to record more random little video clips and take more photos when i'm out doing stuff when i'm
on sets shooting let's jump into canva and edit together a cool little lifestyle reel we'll create
a mobile video probably just start with a blank template and let's go ahead and upload all of the
video clips that we want to use the really cool part about editing videos within canva is that
with canva pro you can actually access directly epidemic sounds music and sound effects library
so i can just go over to audio here and search up i don't know let's do hip hop instrumental
and just like that we can scroll through a library of music from epidemic sound pretty
cool so now that we have the audio in we can start bringing in more of our clips
and start trimming them up to make a cool little vlog type thing editing short little
videos inside of canva is extremely fast and intuitive you can drag around clips
resize them add audio tracks sound effects for something like this a short little simple edit
this is a perfect tool you'd be really surprised with some of the tools and effects you can do
with video editing in canva probably something that deserves its own video so if you guys want
to maybe see me edit an entire youtube video inside of canva let me know down in the comments
look i'm just barely scratching the surface with what i'm doing inside of canva here but i hope
showing you guys a few of these really simple ways that i'm using it can inspire you to find
new ways to add canva into your workflow it's free to use but as always if you guys are
interested in trying it out and really taking advantage of all of those amazing features
you can click the link down below and get two free months of canva pro for free if you guys want to
see more of what you can do inside of canva be sure to let me know down in the comments below
as always thank you to canva for sponsoring this video thumbs up subscribe i'll see in the next one