Transcripts
1. Class introduction: Have you ever wondered, how do I tell people what I do? Hey everyone. My name's Aaron and I'm a filmmaker based over here in the UK. As a writer director of branded and commercial content, I work with brands to turn marketing goals into visual stories and grow a new audience. I love my job and the challenges when it comes with and working with some of the world's most iconic brands and small local businesses has led to some amazing stories and a few awards as well. I never thought growing up that one day I'd get to go into the pitch of a top football team and within the same week be in the cell of a prison. But there you go. So humans have told stories for thousands of years and yet when it comes to selling our own brands as small business owners, we tend to forget that and focus on unimportant things that no one really cares about. But without a clearly defined story that empowers us and our audience, many small businesses, they reach a point where they feel they've plateaued and lost their sense of direction. Now there's one industry that's figured out how to build a loyal audience better than anything else. It's the film industry, it's the movie industry. If you think about your favorite movie, if that was a brand, you'd be the first in line. Now, as a small business, you probably not going to help to support 200 million for a screenwriter and a director. You might not even able to afford two grand for like a video buffer. But the good news is you don't need to. So this class is my opportunity to share with you the tools and techniques that I use when working with new clients to understand their brand and help figure out what is that story that you can tell your audience. But on top of that, I'm also going to show you how to actually create video marketing content and completely for free. By the end of this class, you'll not only have a strong sense of your brand identity and the direction you're headed moving forward, but you'll have tangible video assets that you can post on social today and all you need to complete this course is a free Canva account, which I'll show you how to do in the next video. So if you're ready and you want to learn how to empower your brand and design some stunning video content, then grab yourself a cup of tea and hop on over to the next video.
2. Class Project And Tools: Before we jump in, I want to walk you through what this class project is going to look like and how are we going to create it. This class is split into two parts. The idea being that the first section will give you a really strong grounding about your brand identity. The second part, we can translate that into real video marketing tools. In part one, we're going to be using some digital worksheets and we're going to work through and get to know all our key components for our brand. At the end of part one, we'll create our first project piece, which would be a really nice, stylish movie poster for your brand. The reason we're doing that is so you can refer back to it at a glance and see all of your key components in just one sheet so you can print it off, stick it on your wall and you have your brand guideline right there. Now for the second part, we're going to turn that into real video marketing assets. I'm going to walk you through how to do that completely for free. You don't have to even leave your chair. At the end of the class, we'll create our final project piece, which is to design a piece of video marketing, social media asset. This can be either an Instagram story an Instagram post or just a generic video post. I'm going to show you how to do all three. I'll leave you with a content framework so you can move beyond the class and keep going. Now the content framework is just for you. But the movie poster, and then the social media asset that we're going to create, that's the class project. That's what we're going to share with the group. So to create all of this, all you need is a Canva account and that's where every part of this lesson is going to take place. So to do that, you're just going to go to canva dot com and sign up with Google, Facebook, or email. It doesn't matter which and you only need the free account. You don't need the premium account. Once you're in, you'll get to your dashboard, which looks like this. You'll see a couple of tabs here so you can get an idea of how much you can do with this. But you don't need to worry about any of that for now, because all we need to do is click on the link below and that will take you to a place where you can edit the templates that I've already created for you. Now all your designs are kept in the "All your designs" tab. And here you'll see everything you've worked on, then what you need to do is click on one and it would take you back into it. To get out of it, very similar thing just hit "home." As we go through the class, I'll teach you how to edit these things as we go along, if you don't know, canva is a great tool. So this is almost a second win for you where you can get to know a really great piece of software. So go create a canva account and then we can get started in empowering your brand with a new identity and stylish video assets.
3. Rediscover Your Vision: Internal vs External : The first step when it comes to rebuilding your brand and creating that new identity going forward is understanding your internal journey so understanding your true vision behind your brand. An internal journey and an external journey are both key core components of any great film. The external journey is all the material obstacles that you see. For instance, taking Harry Potter as an example, anything like Fluffy, the three-headed dog, or the Triwizard Tournament, that is part of the external journey, that is a big obstacle that we can all watch and it's entertaining. But that's not the true journey going on inside the character. His internal journey is trying to just have a normal childhood. That's why we love Harry Potter and that's why we are drawn in. It's the character over the plot. Now we will be using the external journey later on to help build a content framework. But for now, when it comes to establishing our vision, we need to focus on the internal journey. This vision that we start to embed into all of our content going forward, is what's going to draw in our target audience, is the theme that's going to resonate throughout. It's really really critical that we get this right to begin with. Now to find it, is not actually that hard. We're going to use a surprisingly efficient technique that was devised by Toyota to try and get to the root of any problem. It's called the seven whys. You're going to ask yourself why seven times. It sounds simple, because it is simple. You have to really embrace your inner child here and try think of your brand as a human. Over the years as we grow with our brand, we lose sight of what was our true calling at the beginning and that's why we're going to go back to the very beginning using this technique. If you click on the link below and you come to this page in canvas, this is where we're going to do most of our work going forward. Now, I'm going to give you a very quick tour so you can just see how this works. It's very simple. If you want to change anything, say you want to change this word here, you click once to highlight it, or you can click twice and then you're in then you can type away. Now to change anything like the font or the font size or the color that's all up the top, so nice and easy there. Then if you want to change the picture in the background to make it more relevant to your brand or to you, then there's two ways we can do this. We can either upload our own picture in the tab on the left, or we can look through this great resource of free photos here. Then you literally, just once you've picked one, drag it in. Let's say you wanted to use that one, just drag it across. Now if you want to adjust it all, then you can come up here, You can see where I've already dropped the brightness and the contrast. So you can see straight away that it's going to not stand out and make it too hard to see the content. Now, I don't want you to get sidetracked and distracted by this. That's something that we can do later on just to make things nice and personalized to you. The core, main important thing here is getting the content in. It's very simple. You start with your goal, whatever that may be, whatever it is that you're trying to sell, your service or product, and then you ask why? Why are you trying to do that? Whatever your answer is there, you're going to then ask why to that. You're going to keep going down until you get to the end. Once you get to the end, then you're just going to create a nice summary that ties at all in, builds up into one, little short sentence and then you may need to transform that into different wording that we can actually use as your vision. I'm going to give you an example using watering can. Now, I am a terrible terrible gardener, I kill plants at quite an alarming rate. But that aside, I'm going to show you how this works no matter what your brand. Let's say I want to sell watering cans. I'll put at the top my goal is to sell watering cans, that's simple. Why? Well, I want people to be able to water their plants. People can water their plants. You don't need to overthink it. We just want to go basic level through and through and through. That way we'll get to the core in our own time. Why do we want people to water their plants? The plants can live in and grow. Why do we want that? So they can flower or bear fruits. Why would we want that to happen? Because it makes me happy. Flowers smell nice. I like fruits. It's going to make me smile. They look, smell and taste nice. That's why fruit's makes me happy, is why plants make me happy. Well, why do they smell and taste nice? Because they clean the environment. Whether that environment is our house, is the air, is our bodies, whatever it is, it cleans it. Why is that? Because they're natural healers, they clean the earth. How does sum up? Well, I want to sell watering cans because growing plants makes people happier and healthier. Now that's great, but it doesn't really sell. I need to twist that sentence into a way, and this is where the point one comes into it, I want to turn that into a vision that will resonate with people. You can change it to we here if you want it to feel more like a brand rather than saying I. We want to make people feel happier and healthier by helping them grow plants, earth's natural healers. When you reflect and you've gone from I sell watering cans to I help people feel happier and healthier by helping them grow plants. It's a very different vibe. Now we can use that as the seed little pun there for you we can use that as the seed to grow our brand identity. This is the core of where we're going to start building and building and building and everybody content going forward will have this theme running beneath it, running through it. We want to make sure that we get this right. Spend 15 minutes, just make sure that you feel confident with this. You might find that the first time going through, you're not allowing yourself to think basic level. Give it a go and then if you need to, give it a second go, but I promise you, this is the most effective way that I found of really tapping into what is the core vision of your brand.
4. The Rocket System: So now that we have a better idea of our why, we understand the internal motivation for our business going forward. We need to see how we can then implement that into creating a stronger brand identity. What we want to do is create a brand that can adapt should anything be thrown in it, say a pandemic. We can adapt the brand without it feeling like we are going completely left field. We want it to still feel like it's authentic and genuine to us. How do we do that? I'm going to show you through NASA essentially, and this is a small NASA, but its NASA. I'm going to take you back to 1962. JFK announces that they're going to the moon. JFK starts with a very strong clear what, so what we're going to do? We're going to go to the moon. Then on top, he asked the how, how are we going to do that? We're going to build rockets, we're going to explore see how far we can go. Then we get to the why, the why being to beat the Soviets, and everyone already knew that. The problem is that this was fundamentally flawed because once they go to the moon, that engines gone. After they reached the moon, funding quickly fell through, public interest fell through, and suddenly NASA found itself drifting again. The problem is they had to build a whole new engine before they could move on, before they could keep going. So for NASA, they had to literally work from the ground up again. That's what we want to avoid here. We're trying to avoid that situation where should anything happen, or should you achieve your goal, whatever that may be, then you effectively have to go back 10 years just to reach the same point. We don't want to do that. Take a look at NASA now, and they lead with their why. This is we reach for new heights and reveal unknowns for the benefit of humankind, that's their vision. On top, then they add their how. The how's a bit long-winded. So let me read it. Drive advances in science, technology, aeronautics, and space exploration to enhance knowledge, education and innovation, economic vitality and stewardship of Earth. So a bit of a mouthful, but you have the idea that you've got a lot of different tools you can use. Then they put the what on top. What is that? That could be satellites, it could be rockets, research and development, educational, outreach, so many options. The beauty is that if you need to change their product or their service wherever it is, they still have a mostly fully functioning rocket system here. All they need to do is just attach another cheap little top it, and it will still work absolutely fine. Compare that time to rebuild an entire engine system. That's what we wanted to do, if your brand, we want to start with the why, always want to start with the why, then we want to lead up into the how before we can explore the different products and services that we can sell as part of our brand. To do this I created the rocket system Worksheet Template for you. It's very simple, you just start from the bottom and work your way up. You already have your vision that you can throw in the why you can throw that down the bottom. That's where we're going to start. Then you can explore your how's. How are you going to do this? Before you can start thinking about the what? In terms of, again, I'm going to take my watering can as an example. My why was I want to make people feel happier and healthier by helping them grow plants as natural healers. How am I going to do that? I'm going to teach them how to nurture plants, how to care for plants. Then my what. It is a watering can now, but then I can start selling seeds. I can make tutorials online. Suddenly I have all these options and it still feels like I'm very, in line with my brand identity. Compare that to if I just said, we sell watering cans and then I try and sell something completely different, it doesn't work. We start with the why, that is our nucleus for our brand identity. We lead up to how and then we go into the what. Click on the link below and then just scroll down until you get to the blocking system,and you can just click in and as it away. If you find yourself struggling with any of this, then maybe just take a look on the group and see some other example. I will up one or two up. That should give you a bit of inspiration.
5. Unearth your Brand Hero: We all know what a hero is and we all have our favorite heroes from the movies. Whether that's Bruce Wayne as Batman or Catherine Johnson from Hidden Figures, which has an incredible story, an incredible true character there. So we all understand the principle, but how do we translate that into a brand? A common mistake that most people make, and it's understandable, is to think that they or the product is the hero. Nine times out of 10, that's not the story. Sometimes it is more likely to be if you are a gas mantle plumber, for instance, but normally it's not going to be the case. So how do we figure that out? Well, let's take a look at Nike as a prime example. Their hero, it's not the CEO, it's not the designer of the shoes, it's not even the shoe itself, it's the athlete who embody everything that that brand represents. It's that never give up mentality, that just do it mentality. They also as a sub-hero, they have the everyday person like you and I who can be inspired and break through our own personal stories. The hero is the spokesperson for the brand. Essentially, we want someone or something to endorse our product and that way people are going to feel more inclined to buy into the whole idea. We don't love Nike because of the product as great as they are, we love Nike because of the heroes, because of our heroes being seen to endorse that product and that's what we want with you. Now, don't worry, we don't have to go after mega superstars, it's just about finding that right angle. Whoever we pick or whatever we pick, they're going to be involved in every bit of content that we put out and no more little boring videos from us talking about why we started this business, it's all about using that hero, that champion to channel our message. I'm going to use a pen as an example. That home, sell me this pen, this is where it comes into it. I could have said, well, it's a silver pen, it's a biro, it clicks, twists, whatever. But instead, I want you to hop on over to Canva and have a look at the hero unearthed template. You can see here, I have who uses the product or service, what does it enable and who benefits? I'm just going to run through this really quick because it's super, super simple. Who uses the product or service and think big here, think big but broad. So writers, and that could be writers of novels or could be journalists. Politicians, that's another one, doctors, scientists, children learning to write and that's a bit more of a nice touch to it. Conservationists. Now, you could go on and on and if you want to add more than what's here, just copy and paste and then drag it down and it will click in for you, you don't have to worry too much about aligning. Once you've had a look at who uses the product or service, then take a look at what does that enable. Say for a writer, it allows him to write amazing stories or as a journalist allows him to reveal the truth, whatever that may be. Politicians, it's new laws, it's creating freedom, life-saving discoveries from doctors, progress and opportunity for children, wildlife monitoring for conservationists. Then go through and look at who benefits from that. Who benefits from amazing books and stories? It's the readers, whether that is me sat on a train or someone lost on an island and the only thing they have is one book. Who benefits from journalism? Well, it's not only the readers, but it is the oppressed who then get their story heard and changed. Similar thing from politicians and new laws, society is the one who benefits. Patients and families benefit from life-saving discoveries. Now, with children it's not only them who benefits, it's also the people who benefit from what they go on to achieve. It's quite a nice, never-ending cycle there. The children, they learn to read and write. They get to sign petitions to change the world. They grow up, they get into a powerful position of some kind and whatever they do that enables another child to start the cycle again and again and again. Conservationists, while the earth and wildlife benefits. Now, what we're going to do is go through and pick one, two at the most, ideally one that really resonates with you and feels own-brand and that becomes your hero. In this case, I'll be drawn to telling the story of children and how learning to read and write, how they can have an opportunity to change their life. That's the story I would go with. The children are the heroes and they use this pen. Think about that in terms of how you're selling it, you go from saying this is a silver pen, clicks into it and it has a biro, to we believe children can change the world, we believe every child should be able to read and write, this is our child who's managed to do that and look where they are now and they use our pen. The whole purpose of the hero is subconscious endorsement, that's essentially what we're going for here. Have a play, like I say, think big, think broad, feel free to have sports person or footballer, maybe don't put David Beckham or Christiano Ronaldo. We're going for the broad but biggest versions of things that we can. Choose, the one, maybe two that you like and then keep a note of that because we're going to build all this together very shortly.
6. Find your Hero's Nemesis: So we have your brand hero, but we need to give them something to fight. We need to find the villain, the nemesis. In films you have Darth Vader, you have Voldemort and Ursula from The Little Mermaid. But fewer brand we need to find the problems or the people creating those problems that you're trying to solve. So it's very simple, I'm just going to show you now how I've created a little Mind map pretending on the gas engineer. What would my nemesis be? Well, it could be cowboy gas engineers, people coming in and doing a bad job. Maybe it's corrosive materials that has been institutes do two different times or different engineers, it might be the missed opportunities. So the people that we go to help, they miss their graduation because they boiler broke. It can be regulation, code houses, or even vulnerable people. Now they're not necessarily a nemesis, but there's a bit of a crossover between victim and nemesis. Like I say, it's any problem or anyone causing the problem, that's what we're trying to overcome. Remember, no one sees himself as a villain anyway. So we're trying to find the problem or the people who caused the problem. The more nemesis that we can create and we can find, the more opportunity that we have to adapt should things change in the future. To create this, you need to go to canva.com/graphs. It's a little bit different. Once you type in whatever you want to call it, so nemesis, say that you know what graph you need, and then come to bubble map over here. Now what you have to do is pick one that you like. You can change it of course as you go in, but just pick one that does the job mostly. Let's say you have a lot of ideas of what your nemesis could be, you'd click on this one on the left, that's nice and big. You can see that it's got nemesis written for me. Great. Happy Days, is as simple as that. Once you've finished it, then when you go back to the home, it will turn up in all your design. So it will be then you'd go back to it and change it. Remember, the nemesis is what it's going to allow our heroes to draw people in with their story. So have fun with this one. See how many you can get.
7. Define your Genre: When people ask, what film do you like, you tend to go for the genre. I like comedies or like horror films or action films, and we do that because it's the easiest way to give across roughly our so of taste and that's what we need to try and do for your brand. The main purpose of this is say, when you write your own copy, you are delivering in a consistent tone of voice. Genre and tone of voice say the same thing. It means that you never string into different genre that your audience is going to be unsure about. Such create this very simple, pop in to Canva, and I'll just walk you through what I have done here. I've started with the hero, and in this case I'm being a photographer. The people I'm photographing, proud and determined tribes fighting for their land, and that's the hero of my brand as a photographer. Then you write the style. Now I know that we haven't covered style, but that's because you probably already know what that is. If you just look at your brand, you have a good idea. If you are lighthearted or the kind of tones that you are going for. If you make bubbly, dry, colorful products or if you focus on dark, moody, serious events. In this instance, focus on the positive moments. Black and white photographs, closer portraits, showcasing unseen events. I know that the tone of voice is one of the positivity focusing on the hopeful. It is insightful, informative, and friendly, and now whenever I go to write any copy, I need to make sure that is a tone of voice I'm talking with. It's really quick and easy, write your hero in here, just come in, select tool then write your own hero. Your style, and from that, you should be able to figure out your tone of voice, your genre.
8. Creating your One-Pager and Poster!: Now that we have all of our key components sorted, we need to package it in a way that we can quickly refer back to it and see it all in one place. I call this the one pager, much like a NASA menu, and we're just going to name our vision, our hero, our nemesis, and our genre in a nice little quick summary here. This doesn't have to be too fancy because we're going to turn this into a movie poster very shortly. But first off, I just wanted to lay down what it is. Now you can either use this template here and you can go in, swap the photos. So say you want to have a canoe background instead, you can do that, or you can change the font. If you want to add a more exciting heading, then come into text, and you'll find a whole bunch of options that you can use. But it doesn't need to be too fancy. This one, this is literally just for you to be able to refer back to, at a very quick glance. Now that we have it all nicely in front of us, we don't have to look for too long to find what we need. We're going to package it into a logline before we turn it into a poster. A logline is a quick summary that we use when describing a film. This is what draws people in, it tells a story in a very quick glance. We're going to do this for your brand. We take a look at the example here. What I have is when nemesis, hero, determined to vision, must hope product or service, can save the day in this genre film. What does that actually translate to? What it turns to. When Maggie an anxious retired woman, is asked to host an awards, a confident and glamorous ex-CEO, determined to restore Maggy's self-belief, must hope a salon can save more than her roots in this glamorously empowering film. Just spend five minutes or so, and get this written out. So you can just go into here, completely delete it all, and then type your own new one. The final step, to all of this, all of what we learnt so far at the end of Part 1, is to turn it into a movie poster. This is our project that we're going to share with the group. We want this to look nice and we want it to look bespoke. You want it to be a fitting for your brand. You're going to essentially create a poster by including a picture, some kind in the background, and then you're going to have a heading, and you're going to pick one of these really cool, funky ones over here, and that's going to be your brand name. For me it's Gloss & Goss, which is my new hair salon. You can see I've put on the top 'your favorite salon drama'. You don't have to put that, you can delete that if you want. You can move any of these things around here, just delete it like that. Then at the bottom, you can see I've put the perfect story in an age where lockdown has led to social anxiety and dodgy haircuts. The key thing is to put your logline somewhere. I've made it quite small here because in an ideal situation, you print this off and put it on your wall somewhere. So that it's big enough that you can read and it looks [inaudible]. But if you want to, if you're going to stick with online digital, then you can just make it bigger and pop it in. It might not look quite as pretty, but it still serves the function. Just to give you an example, if I wanted to put a canoe instead, you can see there it already looks like a poster, but if you want to complete your own brand new one, then what you can do, is come up to templates and find a movie poster that works for you. Just type in film or movie poster up at the top, and find one that you like. Remember, everything is editable. You can pick on an asset, and then you can swap it out for something else. So maybe, hey, you just do like that. It doesn't look particularly great there, but you see the point. As long as it has your company name, and your logline on there and a nice picture, then basically, you can go as crazy as you want with this. So good create it, have fun, feel free to take time on this. This is what we're going to share with the group. Once you've designed it, you're going to come up to the top in this little arrow and click download. You can do it as a PDF or PNG or JPEG, any of them will work, and you want to just do this only this one page. So go down to page 3 and do that.
9. End of Part One : We have reached the end of part 1. But before we move on to part 2, I just want to show you what I came up with for my projects for this, which was the watering cans. So I wanted to see if I could do it for something completely unrelated to my job. Here's where I came up with. I put this in a format that might look a little bit more interesting for you. You can see a bit of a glimpse of what's coming up in the next half of this. So what was my vision? My vision was to make city life happier, healthier, and cheaper. A green home is a happy home. A green home is a healthy home. A green life is a cheaper life. Now, my brand hero is the city dweller who won't be defeated by city life. They always find a way for them, or their family to thrive. So this is open enough that it could be a mother of two children, or it could be that 22-year-old, who's only just new to the city. it's broad enough that I've got some options, but it's a specific enough type of character that I can really hone in on it. The nemesis for my brand is pollution, is fast food, city isolation, city cost, and anxiety. The genre, I've gone for family-friendly, kind-hearted, cheeky, and the plant is a character. The plant has a life of its own, is a friend for our city dwellers. So that means that my tone of voice might sometimes even come from the plant. I put this into movie poster, and I've coded the brand with me. So the idea being that you grow with me from the plant's perspective. So I've put a quote from the film. We can all grow, if we're loved the right way. Then down the bottom, I've put my logline. When a struggling family moves to an expensive city, their hardworking mom determined for her children to be healthy and happy, must hope a wishing can, can save the day, in his heart warming, family-friendly film. It's as simple as that. I'll leave these in the group, so you can have a little look and maybe some inspiration. Just a quick thing, if you're not finding a picture you like for your poster, then I recommend going to unsplash.com. This is an amazing place where you can use lots of free photos, completely free for your brand, and there are such high quality that I cannot recommend this enough. That's what I used to try and get this picture here. So that's why we don't need to upgrade to premium account. If you see a picture you like on Splash, to save it, and upload it, and there you go. Simple as that. Now maybe it gets on to go grab or serve a coffee. Because in the next half of this class, I'm going to start helping you through to build a video strategy, and then turn that into real video assets.
10. Part Two: Conflict and Resolution: You've all probably heard of the three-act structure; the beginning, middle, end, but we want to forget about that for this because that focuses more on a single idea, single unit. We want to think about your content going forward as a series, we want to keep going. For that, to know what to put in that content, we're going to use a very common script writing technique, and it's all about conflict and resolution. That is the heart of any great story. If you go and watch your favorite film, you'll see it's all about a conflict, then that gets resolved, then that creates new conflicts, then a new resolution. That's what drives a story through, and yes, the arch is over a three-act structure, but we're not thinking like that, we want to just focus on what we're going to put in the content to keep it going. We want to hook them in just like we do with our favorite TV series. Now this applies whether you are doing a standalone post or if you're going to do a campaign. If you're doing a standalone post, you want to try and make sure that you have conflict and resolution in that. Now that could be the picture or the video as the conflicts and the copy is a resolution, or vice versa. For instance, if I was a fashion company, it may be something like, "Did you know that the fashion industry is the second largest polluter of water in the world? Resolution is, here's what we're doing, here's our product. That gets rid of that. It works the exact same way for a campaign. To use this idea of a fashion company wanting to create a more sustainable products, maybe your campaign could be you're launching a new jumper, and you're going to to talk in each post about that product that's being launched, but you're talking about all the different areas about it, all the different conflicts and resolutions that you found. The whole campaign is we're launching this new jumper and it may be imposed one, you're talking about how we were tired of seeing the fashion industry use so much water when they're dying their close. We decided to do something about that, first post, second post. We were trying to find the right place to manufacture our dry dyed products, but it was hard, so we ended up traveling the world and these are some of the people we met. Then the third post is the trial runs, giving the products to people, seeing what they think, and getting that feedback, and hearing people talk about this whole idea of environmentally friendly fashion. For every post we're doing, we want to think about the conflict and the resolution. You might even want to think of a cliff hanger, something to keep them going, here's the problem, here's what we're doing, but more needs to be done, and this is the next problem that we want to try and tackle. I want to bring that up now because going into part 2, we need to remember everything we've learned in part 1, and start putting that into video content. Every post that you do, it should have a conflict and a resolution told through your hero, in the genre, the tonal voice that fits your brand, and always striving towards that vision. If we can package all of that into every single bit of content, then you are going to go a long way in capturing your audience's attention. In the next video, we're actually going to start designing these things. Make sure you're taking everything you've learned from part 1, you're keeping in mind as we move in to part 2, and we'll get stuck in.
11. Stunning Free Video: Where to find it: I remember years ago when I worked in a job and I needed a lot of stock footage. Now buying stock footage is very expensive as it's bringing in a filmmaker like me to come and shoot something bespoke. I thought that there must be a better, cheaper way of doing this, and luckily there is. There's a couple of sites we can use to find great free footage, and the first one I want to point you towards is Pexels, so pexels.com has a wealth of really stunning videos for you to choose from, and it's all completely free to use for your brand, so you come into license, you will see that you can use it on your website, your blog, your app, promote your products, whatever you want. The easy way to download something is to click on the little "Download" down the bottom image, but sometimes it doesn't quite work, and in that case, if you right-click and open link in new tab, and then you go into the free download. It'll work fine. It's just a little bug that it has, but it is really worth it. It's great video content. The next one is Unsplash, so this is purely photos is not for videos, but the quality and the range is phenomenal. They have so many options that you can use for your online media content. Beyond that, we have Pixabay, which is photos and videos, and again they have a huge range that you can pick from. Now I find the quality isn't quite as high as Pexels, but it's a good place to look if you're not finding what you're looking for. Now that's all we're going to focus on over the next couple of videos, but I want to quickly just mention Clepomatic on the App Store and also AutoCap on Google Play. If you are going to have any kind of talking head or you're going to do a video in the future where there's going to be some dialogue spoken. Then these tools will allow you to auto capture what's going on, which is really useful for accessibility. Especially in a time when we all tend to have the sound off when looking through things, and don't forget to think outside the box a little bit. If you not finding the most obvious thing to do with your brand, think about all those nemesis, all those those obstacles that you can find video for and that will fit, so go have a look, see if you can find one you like, and then we'll start using that in the next couple of videos.
12. Create: Cinematic Instagram Stories: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to actually make your Instagram stories. We're going to start off in Canvas. I'm just going to type in Instagram story. Really easy. You can see I've already done it there, and then in here you have a whole load of templates that you can go through, take a look at, and find the one that suits your brand. For this, I'm going to keep using the watching can as my product and I'm going to choose this one here. This is one that I've looked at earlier and I think I can work with this. Once we were in, you'll see that you have a whole bunch of different varieties that you can choose from, and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go and find our video content. You're going to hop in to Paxos.com and you're going to find a bit of video that fits your hero or your nemesis, but ideally your hero. For me, I've gone with city go. I now it sounds random, but that's what the whole purpose of this is, is to think outside the box. We're not looking for watering cans, were not looking for gardening. We're looking for our heroes and our heroes are the city people who go ahead and make life happen. They are the ones who move to a new city and are just powering through. I actually saw this one earlier. This is what I'm going to use because it's not really very nice is cinematic but it's also, you got a couple of plump pictures so it seems to fit my niche perfectly and a quick shout-out to cottonbro hair. You can follow the filmmakers who make each of these clips. If you find a selection you like, then you can go on and see everything else they've made, and cottonbro, their work is undoubtedly one of the best bits of work I've seen for all content, let alone free content. Just like we practice in a previous video, we are going to download it. I've already downloaded mine, and then you can come back into Canvas and you're going to go to Upload and then you're going to drop in your video into there. Once you've done that, it's really easy. You just go ahead and put it in the picture, and once you've done that, is then there for you to see. Now the first thing I want to do is go ahead and just make the colors a little bit nicer, a little bit easier to see, a little bit more on brand. I'm going to turn that to a nice white so I can see it, and I might as well do the same for that as well, and I want the background to have a bit more of a green tint. I actually found a green earlier that I thought worked reasonably well. But what you can do, it just come up to new color and if you have a brand hex code, then you can just type that in and you'll have your exact brand color good to go. Remembering that we want our stories to come from our Harris perspective and cover off our vision. Setting the tone of voice and tackle and nemesis, tackle an obstacle. Now for me, for my brand as the watering cans, which was going to be cooled with me, my nemesis was the pollution. It was a cost of living and it was the isolation of living in the city. They're things, it doesn't have to be all of them, but they're the things that I can choose from as a nemesis. Then my hero was going to be those making it happen regardless of that. Whether that is the single mothers, whether that is people who have just moved to the city or maybe it's even older people who feel alone now that savvy, maybe that partners and moved on. I've got a variety of options I can choose from. But remember that we want everything to feel like a story. That's the goal of this, is not just saying facts and figures, it is crafting a story. I'm going to come up with a story that maybe this person here in this video, so if you just click on it and play it and you can see what happens in there. Very clearly is a woman who's just working up in the morning. I'm going to go along with the lines of brand new day, first day in a new city, new job, something like that. New job, new city, deep breaths, and I'm just going to drag that out there. It's condiments come from the Harris perspective there. Imagine her waking up in the morning saying, new job, a new city, deep breaths. That is the rough semblance of a story. I'm just going to move that up here to give us a bit more space, and we're going to do the same with this thing here. Just going to drag it using this little thing and drop it in a bit higher. Also think maybe, we nice to add a little plant onto that. I'm going to come into elements and I'm just going to type in plants. Now, I do have the Pro account sorted here for me, but you will still have access to a lot of these things here and even as a pro, remember it's telling me what is prime, what's not. I just want to find something that could work if I'm just going to have plots, no plants. I want to find something that could work in a free account. There we go. It's going to drop that in there. Maybe I'll shift up a little bit more. If something's not quite right, then you can just use your arrow keys and fine tune it so you get it to exactly where you want it to be. We have new job, new city, deep breaths. We've also got this font here that we can play with. I am going to first change it to a different font, make it a bit bigger. Let's just put it to you 40 for now. What do I want to say? They are the nemesis, there is new job, new city, deep breaths. But the positive here, the hero, the whole purpose of our hero is that they have utilized the power of plants. We want to draw attention to that. Now remembering that I wanted my tone of voice to be Tiki, family-friendly, kind, so I'm going to go with this. Let's give it a little exclamation mark, make it sound dramatic. I'm just going to add place into that. New job, new city, deep breaths, good thing, satisfy is the least polluted place in London. There's my short story and I'm just going to make it look a little prettier now. I don't really want brown as a background color. Maybe pink or I can do white, but let's just go pink for now and let's change that to white. That looks horrible as well. If you are happy with that and you can just go ahead and you can download it as an mp4, and then just straight away, you can just drop that into your phone, into Instagram and you get to go Canvas actually do a very good app. You can download the straight onto your phone from the app, which is a really nice little addition that just cutting down the steps that you have to take. But actually I want to change this a little bit. I don't think I want to have it as just a small part of the screen. I want to make it the whole thing. I'm just going to drag it out. Maybe I'll just move this thing across the other side, or maybe I'll just delete it altogether. We've gone from essentially what was how macrons are made here in this to something completely different. The only thing that we really kept is this beam up here and the font. That's essentially what we've kept, but it's given us a really solid place to start with and allowed me to go ahead and adapt it to the place that I want it to be. Moreover, we have a really nice stylish post that isn't just a boring posts about the product and its features. In fact, we don't even mention a watering can here. We don't really even mention plants but the story comes through in the video. When someone watches this and they read, new job, new city, deep breaths, they understand that. Then good things as flat as at least polluted place in London and we see pictures of plants above her. We understand that she uses plants as a healthy aspect, and obviously is coming from your Instagram channel anyway. Having that little bit of intrigue where people can click through and then on your Instagram page, they can go onto your website and find out more. It's taken us no time a tool to create something like that. Now, I went through earlier and created a few more so you can see a couple of more examples of this. The first one is exactly the same other than it's a different green and then what's nice is that you can also download these things as PNGs. What I could have is I can have this play three is a video, so someone watches this and they see all of that, and on our next page of the story, it just comes up as a picture. All they have is breathe with me and then maybe you can add more information. You could go in on Instagram add some fun text, whatever you want. Now a couple more examples for you so you can see how you can build a story using your hero and your nemesis. This is imagining that it's maybe early September and you're trying to target students. I've gone along lines of bringing on Ganesh, no problem. Homegrown mint, living that budget life like a queen, and then the video is, someone celebrating, someone dancing. It's got that student vibe as well and I've even added a nice little watering can as a little note to the product. To add that I just went into elements and I was away. Happy days. Now maybe I wanted to run this Instagram story as a campaign during student season. This could be my next post and think I was going to buy mint indulge with me. That's quite fancy drink for a student. But just by growing the Riemann, they can start to indulge and live that life they want to lead. Beneath that, I thought I'd do one about the parent's inside so I have grow with me and these headings here, I just got from the text chapter over here. I just found a nice one so you could just pick any of these exactly the same as anything else we created and just drop it in. If you want to create an interesting shape, then if you go into elements and you type in frame, then anything like this where it has a cloudy, sky, hills, that is something you can drop in. Let's, for instance, just take this one here, and then you go to the pictures that you've applied it or any of the other ones. It can be a video or picture, doesn't matter what, and you can just drop it on top and it will then turn over. Just like that, you can have your interesting shapes to use for your video content. That's exactly what I did here. I just pulled in one of the shapes and then dropped the video over the top. What's the story going on here? Sarah's parenting hack, "grow your own onion and garlic is easy and it makes dinner cheaper and tastier." It's very simple and I've even said what part of the vision is right on the nose there. I've just said, it makes dinner cheaper. Then you can start to create a bit of a campaign theme going. If you keep the same consistent brand fonts, the same consistent brand colors, you can build that Instagram story campaign. The last one I've just put is moving is scary unless it's with you. Rather than it being the hero, this is actually coming from the sidekick point of view. They're saying moving is scary unless it's with you. That can either be seen as the owner of the plant talking to the plant or the plant talking back to the owner. That's how we can very simply, very easily make some really stylish Instagram stories, and then you can either just downloaded all of them or you can go in and you can choose which ones you want to download. It really going to be simpler and the difference it makes is huge, compared that to you struggling to find what supposed to thinking about posting the same content day in, day out. Just go in, create something very bespoke, very different but that feels in line with your brand identity that we've now built together. Go ahead and make your own, have fun choosing wherever template you want, and don't worry if you can't find the perfect video to begin with. Just get in the habit of looking through Paxos and understanding what's there. Remember to think outside the box, is a really important thing to this. We're not trying to think on the noise, we're trying to think how we can navigate around our product to sell the product. Remember, it's all about having your product endorsed.
13. Create: Scroll-stopping Animated Posts: Now you have some really nice Instagram stories going, when people come onto your channel, your feed, you want them to see something that is going to be befitting for that story, which means we need to make sure our posts are also going to be along the same lines. Now, you don't need to be a genius to figure out, you can do exactly the same thing as what we've just done, but just using a normal Instagram post. You could go in to any of these and then you could change things as you want to, but there is something extra we can do to make it just a little bit more fun, if you want to. We have something called Animated Social Media. We don't just want to click on this one up here, we want to scroll down until we get to the complete category because that way, we can hit See All, and then we can go in and we can look at all the options we have. Now, these offer a lot more in terms of versatility when it comes to design and it already has some really nice added animation already in there for us. Just having things like that, takes off the pressure for us, it's already done. So we can just go in and tweak the pictures or the colors and make it a little bit nicer. Now, I'm going to give you an example here. The one that I've chosen is this one here which isn't particularly nice, but I'm going with it anyway. You can see the main template here. This is just as it was. I didn't change a whole lot, I just used what was there and made it a little bit more bespoke. In the background, I just dropped in some random photo using photos over here. I just dropped in this one here and then adjusted the brightness and the contrast, so it didn't take away too much from the main attraction. I've left the sunshine there and I've added my with me just to have an option but to be honest, I'll just get rid of that. What I've done, is I've added a picture of two kids, and the line I've used is, "Thanks mum for feeding us, singing to us, helping us grow big and strong," and underneath the kids say thanks too. The picture I'm painting here is that actually, this is coming from the plant and the plant sees whoever is looking after them as the mum. Now, with Instagram content, you want to be making sure that you're writing good, strong captions underneath, so you want to give more context to this any way, because the longer you can keep someone engaged on your post, the better for a whole number of reasons. But this angle here, it just gives off that kind of child-friendly sign to it. Maybe if I was really going to post this, I would actually have a slightly more child-friendly background or maybe I wouldn't even have a background it too, I just have some color of some sort. I don't know what exactly, but anything really. But once again, it's all about repositioning the way you're telling your brand story, so we're not looking to say, I sell a watering can, that's what I do. I'm trying to paint the picture of a brand that helps families be happy and healthy, feel good, and that is exactly what I've done here by suggesting that a plant is part of the family, the plants grown big and strong, and the plant is loved. Then that's reflected in the kids as well. So anything like that where we can turn our hero and our nemesis and our vision, all in our tone of voice that we choose into a post, rather than just thinking about how can I post about my product today. In this example I've just said, "Thanks for making this city less scary. Also, I love your new haircut, get the secateurs." Once again, going from the plant's point of view. Now, some of these different assets here, you might find that when you click on an animated design, that they are premium feature only, so stickers is where we have all the animated features that we can use. You can just drag them in and then place them wherever you want. Now, I'm not saying this is the prettiest thing in the world, but I'm just showing you how it works. What you can do, is then go up to position and you can choose to move it backwards or forwards if you want. So I could send this behind the picture like that. You can see where it's gone, behind the photo, but it's in front of the white background there. Now, your brand, your style may not be this kind of animated, happy style, maybe you're more serious. What we can do is just build a brand new one completely, so you can just come down to add new page and drop in any photo, any font, anything you want. Or if you want to stay in the video world, then what I did here, is I just dropped in three different videos and placed them roughly the same size. If I go up to play and I'll just scroll through the first ones that I didn't really care about. Over here I could talk about something to do with the plants being in the background, they're always there, they're always supportive, remembering that our copy is as much of the post as the picture is. We really want to engage people with both, and we want to hook people in with the content, and then we want to keep them there with the captions. When you're working with a new page, you can literally do anything you want with it. Text, or photos, or video, or animations, it's up to you what you choose to do. So let's say you want to make a video post, what you can do is size it up so you get it full page. Let's just get that where we want it. If you double tap you can move it around, get it exactly to where you think fits best with the frame, and I'm just going to choose a text to go over the top. I'll go with that, be brave. Maybe let's make it a strong blue maybe. My point is that, no matter what your brand style may be, there is something that can work for you here, it's just as a matter of choosing what works best for you. Remember to go in at the templates and have a look. I've just picked some very basic ones here to show you how you can work from the ground up, but you could choose something that is already really quite nice, like this one, for instance, and maybe you could even use that if your brand is something to do with adventure and exploring. You could just come in and change the copied with something more relevant or just delete it and then just build up your own copy in the caption. Just remember that when you upload this, you need to download it as a video. These animations will only work as a video files, so if you download it as a PNG or JPEG, it won't work. So if you want animations download it as a video file, upload it and, happy days. That is how you do that.
14. Create: 16x9 YouTube/FB Videos: The last video content I want to show you how to make, beyond the story and beyond the animated posts, it's just a video in general. This is something that we again can do in canva, which is brilliant. If you come down, you have video as an option and then you have a couple different options here so you can look through and if you wanted to square one, then there's Facebook video. If you want just a normal standard 16 by nine, then you go for the YouTube intro. 1920 by 1080, 16 by nine, they're the same thing. 16 by nine is the ratio, 1920 by 1080 is the resolution. It's going to take a look at one of these. Now I'm in, you can see on the left, I have many different options here. What's type of video I want to have. If I want a slide-show video which is just photos scanning through like a slideshow. But we're just going to scroll down to all results. In here, once more, you can look through different templates that are already in place. Then you can go in and use these already made for you. You could either use that video there if you would like to, or once again, you could upload your own video from pexels so you find the right video that suits your brand. Let's say, it's this one. That's interesting. It's quite a nice little video. You could just delete all of these things if you want, or you could drop in your logo. Let's say you uploaded your logo. I will just drop in one of these as a little example, so let's pretend that's your logo. You could put that down in the corner. Then what works well in video is to have things centered. I would actually probably be more inclined to do something a little bit like this. We'll just pretend it never gets easy, suits our brand. I've even got some nice animation in there for me as well. It's really easy to create a nice bit of video content. Just by adding your logo if you want to, or a bit of text, you can create a bespoke bit of marketing for yourself. The best bit is that if you add a new page, then whatever video you drop in will continue to play in the same video file. Annoyingly, you do have to size up yourself, but it's a small price to pay for the benefit that you get. This is almost editing, really where you're just going to go through each one. I could copy this across down here and the logo. You're not going to see that very well. Let me drop in another background instead. There you go, so you can make it just drop-in if you're replacing a different one. Now I have two different clips with two different bits of text as well, and the logo stays the same. But it says here 59 seconds, so what we need to do is go in and trim this. If you click on the video, up here you have your trim feature. I know for a fact that most of the camera stuff is at the end of this video, and all the nice stuff with the faces at the start. I'm just going to have five seconds of that. Same thing with this, it's only 10 seconds long. I'll just make that about five seconds as well, and then I'll hit play. Now you could use that on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube. You could use it on anything you want really, it's just there to create a bit of video marketing for yourself. Now this will never replace getting a filmmaker to come in and create one consistent, coherent story. But by going through this, you can build up what is your brand story. That way when you decide to hire a filmmaker, you're not going to spend a lot of money on creating something that actually you're not going to want to use because it's just intervene yourself. If you've created something like this, you can show it as an example and say this is the thing I'm after, and that gives them an idea of how much it's going to cost, of how feasible it is. It's also nice to get the jobs, which isn't just an interview and shots of your product. It's really exciting for a client to come and say, we want something curated that tells this story for this reason. Now if you want to add music, then you can come to the music tab, and then you can look through and find the free bits music. Or if you want to upgrade to the pro, you can look at it pro bits as well. There are other sites where you can use music, but they tend to be quite expensive, and they tend to have different rules about where and how you can use them. I would suggest if you're wanting to use music to try and stick in canva, having said that, I have not explored the library too much. There's a couple of other places we can look if you really want to add music. One of these places is AudioJungle.net. The quality and the pricing varies drastically, but it's a place where you can find music at varying levels. They can range from $1 a track up to $90 or however much you want to spend really. There's that option, or if you find that you're going to be using music a lot and you want something of a bit more of a high-quality, then Artlist is a great source of music where it works on a subscription basis. It's about $200 a year I believe. Yes, $199 build annually. There's other platforms out there that you can use. Just make sure that you're not using a pop song of some because you'll get into a lot of trouble for that. Particularly if you've used this system and actually create something that looks quite nice. Once you're done, exactly the same as before, download it as an MP4 and hit all pages and it will tie that into one nice file for you. Then you just upload that straight onto YouTube or wherever you want. Once again, don't be afraid to look through the templates and make sure that you are remembering everything we've learned about using your hero, your nemesis, your vision, and your tone of voice, your genre to build that narrative that really resonates with your target audience.
15. Consistency: Okay, by now, I hope that you have some really nice Instagram or Facebook posts and you're excited to get them out there. But before we part ways and you go off and do that, I want to talk to you about a very important element to stop you falling into a trap that a lot of people tend to. A big thing in our culture today is, we're told that consistency and regular posting an older lie is really important to engagement. Yes you do want to make sure that you're posting on a regular basis. You don't want to post just once a year. But we don't want to fall into the trap of posting quantity over quality, because the most important thing is our brand identity stays strong. We want to make sure that we're always delivering our message as the hero, and the right tone of voice with a conflict resolution, and not posting random things because we feel that we need to. I want to give you an example, it's a bit basic, but it does a job very efficiently. Say this is your Instagram feed and these are two posts here. You can see that the thread of your brand, the brand identities is nice and strong, and I think it's great. Now, say you don't post for a little while, and you put it back up. As long as you are consistent and it's staying in with your why you're staying into your brand identity, then who is going to mind and your thread is going to stay nice and strong. Equally, if you choose to post something that isn't necessarily what you were posting but it stays in line with the brand identity, remember going back to that rocket, our top capture you can change. Then again that's fine. It still feels in line with what we're doing, so far its part of our thread. An example might be something like, for my watering can business, I'll post different content to do with looking after your flowers, some contents do with seeds, some training videos. It can go from different tangents, as long as it all fills in line with my brand identity. Now when you want to post something just because you haven't posted in a while. Say for my garden, watering can business, I decided to post something about wrestling for instance. Well, this is what happens, so your thread suffers a lot and your other content suffers. The truth is that, with different algorithms and things like that, people aren't seeing every post you do anyway. So you want to make sure that the ones that they are seeing are at least relevant and on brand and tell the story you want to tell. Don't just post because you feel like you have to do. A really good tip is to do batch designs. That's something I like to do when I am going to create some posts. I'll go through and I'll make 10-20 for instance, and then they're good to go. Then when I want to post in the future, I don't have to worry about doing it right then and there. Remember, consistency and discipline are far more important than just posting every day. We want to create value for our target audience. We don't want to block up that feed with spam, things are not relevant at all. Now I don't want to put you off from posting today, for instance. In fact, the whole point of this is to suggest that you can do that today, and then in two weeks time you can create another five, another ten and then you can post them over the next few months. So don't rush it, don't feel that you have to be hitting your target of once, twice a week. Just post when you have something to say that you feel stays in line with your brand identity.
16. Content Framework: So now that you have the insight and the tools to go ahead and start creating your video content, you want to make sure that you feel confident in what you're actually going to say and that's why I've created this very basic concept framework for you. All is doing essentially, is giving you a bit of space to think about your conflicts and your resolution. You could do this on a bit of paper, you could do this on anything. I've just put it in an Excel spreadsheet, so is there if you want it. I know it can be hard sometimes to think about what to post and that's why it's nice to maybe just have a day when you plan all your video posts and you think about more that each going to say, then you're going to Canva, you create them all and then you're good to go. It's up to you, but it's down below if you want to use it.
17. Outro: We've come to the end of our class. I want to thank you first for coming on this journey with me. I hope that you have a much stronger sense of your brand now, and you have some more tools to get going. By all means, explore Canvas. See what else you can use it for. It's got so many nice features on there to do with reporting or different types of marketing. It's worth taking a look and just having a little bit of fun. Don't forget to share what you made with the group, and have a look at what other people have made. It might even give you inspiration going forward. It's always nice just to encourage each other to keep going and keep making new content. My final tip for you before we part ways is just to remind you that growth happens in the uncomfortable. It's the places that we've never been before, that's where we're going to learn and discover new things about ourselves. If something feels a little bit scary, don't be too afraid to go there and try it because that is where we are going to grow. As a brand and just as a person, just like for me, doing this whole video series has been a growing experience in itself. Also, if you have a spare a few minutes and you want to hop over to my website, check out some of the films I've made, sign up to the short stories that I put out every two weeks, I'll be really thankful for that as well. It's always nice to keep a community growing. I wish you the best of luck, and by all means, feel free to leave a comment below or drop me an e-mail. I'd love to know your thoughts on the class and I'd be keen to see some of the content that you've made as well. Until the next video series, whenever or wherever that may be, if you have any ideas, by all means, drop me a line and maybe I'll make a class on that. Until then, I wish you the best of luck, and I'll see you soon.
Aram Atkinson, Storyteller. Filmmaker.
