Distributing My Own Tutorials

This week: sharing videos with the right audience, not the largest one.

I've always struggled with making useful tutorials for aspiring editors and animators. Sure, I often post 1-minute behind-the-scenes of my edits, but I specifically dumb those down for the sake of a general audience.

The problem with making actual click-this-button tutorials is that posting them on YouTube doesn't feel like the right option. They're highly niche, so they typically get buried in the feed. They're public, so they need a level of polish that adds production time. And I don't necessarily want to be a tutorial channel.

As an experiment this past week, I released some tutorials for my 10 Types of Magic video directly through a digital shop (via unlisted video link) and promoted them on my social media - to great success.

By directly distributing them, being highly niche doesn't matter because they're not competing for attention in a feed. Production level can be 'good enough' for the sake of clarity and the scripting can be to-the-point - they don't need to be 'YouTube entertaining'. And my general audience gets the magical stuff, with those who want to learn from me having an off ramp away from my main content.

👉 All that to say it feels 'right' to be able to quickly produce useful tutorials away from the clicks-and-views mentality of YouTube!

In the future, I'll make sure to send the links directly to this mailing list first - I needed to test a bunch of stuff for this first go around. But for those interested, here are the free lessons (I recommend checking out lesson 4 if you want to see how I make jump cuts invisible):

1️⃣ Intro & What’s Included: https://youtu.be/5oicXQcOqKQ
2️⃣ After Effects Project Breakdown: https://youtu.be/QgD1RiV54TU
3️⃣ Invisible Edit Deep Dive: https://youtu.be/eY_D37YEHX0
4️⃣ Generating Frame Interpolated Blends: https://youtu.be/IIVCG0e9lc8

And if you feel like grabbing the 10 Types of Magic After Effects project file to see how I construct my edits, you can use the code MAGIC50 for a 50% discount.