Reels and TikTok for Digital Artists: Learn how to Boost your Art

1. Intro to the Class: Hi guys, My name is Maria. I'm an illustrator and character artists from Turin, Italy. I have been working in the publishing industry for the past five years. And in all the time, I've also been active on social media and as an educator here on Skillshare, you might have found this course through my previous classes on creating cartoon characters and other tips and tricks for Procreate and Photoshop. Or we may offend me through my class on how to create a successful art account on Instagram. This course is definitely going to be about Instagram and mostly how to better promote your art through reals and TikToks. I have been on Instagram since 2017, so it's been quite a few years. I've seen a lot of trends coming and going the infamous algorithm in the past couple of years, I've noticed how when you post a picture, it definitely gets a lot less views than when you post a video or a real. This is because Instagram is transitioning towards video and Rails more and more. And as a digital artist who usually got a lot of effort into creating art and therefore would like to see that are shared and supported. Of course, it's important to make the most of that exposure if you're a digital or traditional artists and you don't really know how to video and how to make Rios, but you're likely to try it then this course is for you. I'm sure that you've seen a lot of people making Arthur reveal videos. And those are super fun. I am all for Arthur views. I loved making them and I do use them on my account as well. But in this video courses specifically, I would like to share with you guys my process in analyzing and finding trends and adapting them to my art. Not just doing art reveals, but trying to branch out and use the whole spectrum of rails that are available to us out there and adapt them to the art medium. Since I've started using Rails more, I haven't noticed huge uptick in my exposure, in my reach and in my interactions. I hope that I can show you guys my process and help you get there as well in terms of tools, don't worry if you're not professional filmmaker, I am not either in this class. I'm only going to be using my phone. Tripod and Instagram's in-house editing tools. Of course, there's a few more bits and pieces that you can get. And I'm going to be talking about it in the class as well. But they are definitely optional. And so don't worry if you don't have them, it's totally fine. If you want to start making the most out of your article. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: Hi guys and welcome back. Let's spend a couple of minutes talking about the course project. During the next few videos, I'm going to be showing my process step-by-step. So from the conception and planning of the real to shooting, producing, and Boston, as we go through this process, you can expect to learn how to scout and find trending sounds, how to prepare an artwork for a real, or how to choose an artwork that you have already done in the past in order to include it into a real how to shoot urea without a huge budget. Just trying to get the few bits and pieces that you really need to make sure that your production value looks quite high. But without breaking the bank, how to edit your reel in Instagram using the in-house tools that they have and how to recycle your video and post it on several different social media platforms in order to maximize your efforts. I'm going to create a sample project in the project section. So please do head over there to check it out and see how I created the project. If you want to follow my lead, or you can just create it and organize it in the way that you prefer. It's totally up to you. Don't forget to update your project so that your classmates and I can give you feedback. And don't forget to give feedback to other people too. At the end of the day, Skillshare works because it's a community. It's always nice to be able to connect and interact with other fellow students, right? So you see you in the next video for the first class. 3. Scout a Trending Sound: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to talk about how to scout a trending sound. There's so many people on Instagram nowadays claiming to be able to find a trending sound before it starts trending. Or that if you use a specific sound, your videos, we'll start trending. I don't know how believable that is, the reasons behind a video going viral or a sound starting to trend, or two random to really predict. But I do think that there are a few things that you can look for in a sound. And that will help you figure out whether that is a sound that has the potential of being a good sound if only because it's the sound that is memorable. And therefore people will stop and look at it instead of keep scrolling down. Here, as you can see, I'm on Instagram. I've got my feed and I'm going to go into the middle tab here, the real tab. As you can see in the real tab, it's a little bit different from the image. Feed is full screen. For starters, it's vertical like portrait, full screen. And if you simply scroll down, it will show you a different real, they are not real from people that you necessarily follow. So this is one of the reasons why choosing to make reals, it's a good solution for you because you're Rio has the potential of being seen by a lot more people and especially people who not necessarily follow you. I would recommend you guys to duties maybe not even once a day, maybe once every couple of days to just set a scroll down on the real tab. I know it may sound like you're literally doing nothing. The procrastinating and waste your time on social media. But I don't think that it's especially if you approach it with a critical mindset. I think these can be actually researched. Whenever I'm not doing anything, maybe I'm going to break. I just scroll down and every real that I feel like could possibly be adopted to my art and promoting my art. I just save it. So you just need to go into the real sound is this little image here and just click on Save audio. So when you go back on your profile and you go into your saved tab, you're going to find them all here into the safe. I've got a few sector up. And this is really useful because whenever I have my real shooting day, I can just go into my side tabs and start looking up all the sounds that I've saved in the past week or so. And yeah, I'm basically just shoot ten videos then I can post over the week. But I'm going to talk about how to plan and execute ratios in the following videos. So let's go back to the original tab, how to find a good sound. I know it sounds a bit gimmicky because they all start with R. But I usually use the three are method, which is a method that you won't find anywhere because I just came up with it. And that is rhythm, repetition and relevance. Rhythm. Because of course, reals are all about music and sounds. Tiktok exploited because people were doing TikTok dances, Instagram seems to be a little bit older in terms of target instead of TikTok. But in general, the music is still super important. The rhythm is super important because can help you time your transitions. So for example, if you are doing an art reveal, which is the staple type of real that you can do. If you're an artist, you might want to time your art stages basically with those rhythmic pulses. Or if you're doing a different type of art promotion video, for example, you have ten art prints dropping on your shelf. You want to show all ten of them. You can choose a sound with a good beat. And then to each beat, you can show a different brain. If you want to show a more contemplative process, then you might want to use a slightly less rhythmic sound, less snappy, more like something Lo-Fi or classical piece of music. Rhythm has to be appropriate to your content. Second are repetition. What you want as a creator is that people will want to stay on your reel for as long as possible without scrolling down. So the way that you can make sure that that happens the most is if you choose a sound that loops in and people will be drawn in even more than our relevance. There's tons of trends that you can use on rails and TikToks. But they do tend to go out of fashion quite quickly. So my advice would be to choose trends that have only just started. If you go on the sound of a specific real, it will show you how many people have used that sound already. So for example, here there's 3,570 reels. And some of them have a lot of views like this, 1, one million, four or 85.3, but a lot of them don't really have that many views. I'd say this audio which I haven't even heard countless yet. It's probably middling trending. So you might want to use it if you like it, it might become more of a trend or it might just disappear. It's kinda like a fine balance between choosing sounds that are very, very famous. But where your real my kinda get lost. Or choosing sounds that are not very famous, but you think will become relevant. Relevance is not just about trending, but also about your specific niche. There's digital artists that have a very painterly style. Digital artists who do GBs, traditional artists who do huge canvas paintings. Each one of these branches of art has their own niche. Of course, when you choose a sound, you need to address whether that is relevant to your niche. If you make, for example, very pretty hostile type of art, maybe a sound. It is very aggressive, aggressive dubstep. It's not really super relevant to your audience and your aesthetic, although you never know because of the contrast with your aesthetic, that, that can be done, but it's a conscious choice. I think when you're done with your research time, I would say give yourself a time as well because when you fall down the rabbit hole of TikTok and Instagram, it tends to be the pole. Maybe set yourself a timer like 1520 minutes. And when you're done, you have saved maybe ten sounds, maybe five, doesn't matter. At least you have some, some sounds and, and use them. Next when you're in your shooting day. This is sort of a pre-production step that you can definitely do and putting your project. It's more about pre-production, as I was saying, and establishing a methodology to always be in the loop with the latest sounds. In the next video, we are going to talk about how to decide what's gonna be the content of your real and how to brainstorm ideas. See you there. 4. Tools for Note-Taking: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to talk about how I find and put down ideas for my videos. First of all, I'd like to say that this is not a true for everybody sort of process. I'm just going to put forward a few ideas and things that I've experimented in the past. And you can try them out and see if they work for you. Even though maybe you'll find your own workflow that works best for you. If you find a sound that inspires you and you think, oh, that would make real than totally go ahead, use it straightaway. You can take your phone, shoot some videos and material. However, if you're trying to do this as a business, or at least it's something that you want to do consistently. You probably want to do it with a bit more structure. And this is because of shooting Instagram Reels and TikToks. Time consuming. Of course, it's not as long as shooting normal videos, like full length videos that go on YouTube or this kind of video courses that I should for Skillshare. But they do still take some time to maximize your experience and make sure that you're not wasting anytime. It's good and tested method to pretty much have a structure where you work in batches. What does that mean? I usually write down about ten to 15 real ideas. Then of those ideas, I probably end up shooting maybe five or ten. And I'm going to shoot them all on one day, which is the same day every week. And then I'm going to be posting them throughout the week or ten days, Monday or in two weeks? That depends on nu and what's your availability and once your posting schedule to know more about kind of thing, like when to post and what sorts of media and materials to pause. You might want to check out my previous video that I mentioned before, the video course about creating an account on Instagram. The place where you want to write down your real ideas can be again, up to your workflow. So you could be using a traditional sketchbook. You could be using your phone, just, it just didn't note taking app on your phone. Which in my case is not because I'm using an iPhone or a planner or a note taking digital app on your tablet. All these tools are just that. They are just tools. They don't matter at the end, as long as they help you convey your ideas. So the way that I usually do it is that I would write most of my ideas on my phone and my notes on my phone are pretty full. I always ran nice for everything. Even if I have a book idea, I post idea for Patreon. Basically whenever I hear something or I think something that I think this might be remotely interesting. I tend to just write it on my note-taking app. And I know that I can go back in there and look through it and make sure that I find some good ideas. Another really good method that I tried, but that's more to organize as well as putting down ideas is to have a diary or a not taking diary on my, on my iPad. So I've been using good notes on my iPad with a digital PDF of a diary. Digital PDF diaries work with hyperlinks so you can turn the page to the current page or you can go back. You can go to your nut section. And I think they're quite useful to be honest, I ended up buying a physical version of a diary, mostly because I enjoy the feeling of writing on paper. And I thought that the iPad version, they didn't really give me the same satisfaction. Also the fact that I can just flip through the pages and don't have to go to a specific hyperlink to find the note or the information that I wanted to find with a physical diary, I can just flip through it and go, Oh yeah, I remember I wrote that thing. And that's useful overall. Just choose your poison and make sure that you stick to it consistently and you make it part of your routine. So make sure that whenever you have an idea, you might just be scrolling through Instagram and literally an idea comes up or you see a real that speaks to you and your immediate reaction should be to save it in your same category and then to write down in your chosen place the idea for real. 5. Brainstorm Reel Ideas: So going specifically into the writing and planning of your Rails, the way that I do it is it usually I go into my saved sounds and go back to listening to them to remember, why did I save them in the first place? I don't care who's doing better than me because I'm doing better than I was lashing. It's me again. Okay. Okay, so for example, these sound because success, original audio, It's about motivational speaking. Like, I don't care who's doing better than me. I only care that I'm doing better than I was. So this kind of sound is the perfect example of something that is not necessarily art related, but could definitely be applied to the art field without much change to the context in terms of rhythm. Of course it doesn't really have any because it's mostly just a sentence. But it does have some musicality to it. In terms of repetition. It depends, I think, how you should this, and it can be quite repetitive. And in terms of relevance, it's super level. So usually when I gave you guys the free our check, it doesn't necessarily mean that everything on those three hours have to be 100%. If something is super relevant, it can be maybe slightly rhythmic. It's a balance, as I was saying at the start of this video course, the idea behind this course is to try and make reuse for your audience without just doing art reveals these sorts of audio is perfect because you can be using it with lots of different footage. You could be using it whilst you're drawing, or you could be showing it by redrawing something that you drew the year before. So I'm going to write them them. What you can do is that you can write down the audio or in some way that you can recognize that it's this audio they were talking about. The best idea, I think for this audience would be to show a drawing that you did maybe a year ago. And then you can show some bits and pieces whilst you're redrawing it. Finally, you have a review of the retro at the end. There's obviously a million other ways that you could be using it. As I was saying, you could be just showing a bunch of different art and feel like progression. So you wouldn't have the process in that case, you would just have the art being shown. You can either do it by clicking your fingers. Let's go back to our list of sight. This is that it's very rhythmical. Pam. So you could be having 123 steps of the drawing or one to three shoots of view drawing. And then finally, the reveal, but just not to show just reviews. You could also be doing it with, for example, studio work, getting ready for a day of work in the art studio. So you can show your coffee, your music, your tools, and then you finally sitting down to work. I don't know. I'm just brainstorming here. I'm gonna go with 123 steps plus final art. Let's go up another one. Are we supposed to know what we're doing? Now? Great. Just checking. Okay. This is the kind of audio that again, doesn't really have that much rhythm to it. But it's perfect for repetition, I think, because it lays quite heavily on humor, which is a huge component I think, of reals and TikToks. So you could be using these by either dabbing the sound. And in the meantime, look kinda disheveled, trying to paint on a wall or something, or turn it down a little bit less caricature. And you could be just drawing, but like maybe a drawing that you don't like. Maybe you're in the middle of a piece of art that is not coming along as you imagine it would. So you can be showing that, I think showing aside of your artistic process that is not as perfect. We're not everything is always beautiful and manicured is actually something that people really enjoy. So I'm gonna go with that. The voice was, you can also see in the shot that I'm just drawing random lines on Procreate. Everything is content. Everything is content. Don't forget to a bailment. Don't forget if everything is content, true. This one, I mean, you can pretty much just use it in any niche. I think any content creation niche, it does itself pretty much just. Film, any sort of in-between studio moment that you can think of and just put it there. I mean, everything is content. I tend to divide my reals into ultra reviews, which of course include process, pretty much final product, sort of motivational reals where I'm not showing the process, I'm just showing the final product and either thinking about it going like, Oh, this is good or this is my art, whatever. Or to your work and tangential sorts of work where I have a show in my studio. I show my process as a creative person, not so much as a digital artist. This one definitely fits in the third category. Stop scrolling. Hang on 1 second and look at this thing I made. Okay, thanks. You can keep scrolling now. This is pretty good for any content creator, anybody that makes things attention-grabbing, start plus show the final product, remember to change the cats. As you can see, I only put down the name of the oil for the first one and then I'm just going down with numbers. And that's because I am, I started here at Book of success and then I'm just going down and putting down one idea for each audio. So there's no need to every time, right tone which budget is because I'm going in order. So it's gonna be pretty obvious which one it is. You want to know what it is? It's this I can't live without it. Okay. So this one, again, pretty good. I think it was born as a real idea for the beauty industry. But for us artists, we have tons of tools that we can't live without. So in my case, is probably the dry ink brush in Procreate. Okay. Number seven. Okay. This one is actually pretty long as real as well. And it's got rhythm, It's got repetition, relevance. You give the relevance. In this case it doesn't have any relevance, but also it doesn't not have any relevance. Is the audio that is really good for showing processes pretty much. Or show a series of finished artworks or just anything in your studio that has some sort of makes sense with each other like consistently. In this case, I would probably for this one, I would probably go either you could in this case, I could either show a bunch of brains that all belong to the same sorts of series. For example, while back a few months back in March, I think I did a series of prints of Bridgestone characters. So each time that the beat changes, I could be showing a different character or I could be showing the steps to a specific artwork. I'm gonna go with the print ideas, show the prints one by one, and then all the brains together. Another alternative could also be not to show all the prints together at the end, but for the repetition factor, if you finish the real at the bit in the music where you're about to have another beat. And then the beat goes back to number one. Then it becomes a loop and very, very repetitive. So I might actually just go one by one. Number eight, I didn't want to work a nine to five job. I started my own business. Now I work 247. This one is really funny. So despite the fact that I have too many motivational sentences, I'm gonna be using this. This one is for anybody who has made the transition from a md5 job to a freelance job like I did a few years ago, you could be dumping this or you could just be doing whatever you do for your freelance job. Again, I'm going to try and change the cuts to make it a little bit more interesting. So probably have different moments where I'm drawing different footage. And this is really good because I can just use recycled footage from previous reuse and then just put them together until the end where it's just my face and I couldn't recycle. Number nine. This one is super long. It goes on for four minutes. So I'm just going to put it there. So this is one of those really lo-fi quiet. Any music, it feels like something out of Animal Crossing. This is the audio, doesn't really have any rhythm, but you could be using it as background for a process and use your voice-over to record over it. For example, I did a couple of weeks ago where I will show in my process for writing out story plot lines for a book. Hey guys, Today, I'm creating a timeline for the events in my book. I have my rough outline, my character nodes, and the bunch of blank piece of paper. I'm writing every single event that happens in the character's backstory and the present story, highlighting it with different colors. Then I'm putting them up on my porch with paints so I can easily change the order if it doesn't make sense. Here's my product line. I just chose a very quiet, very mellow kind of background song. Then I put my voice other on top. And that way it works because that's just kind of like a background sound. Very nice. This one is more towards the quiet side, the truncal side, but it also handles have some rhythm to it. So you could be using it for process or for something that needs a beat. Just look pretty prices of my art. Enjoy. As you can see, I have my ten ideas here. Didn't take very long. So of these ten ideas, I would probably just choose five of these to shoot. The ratio of good ideas and can viability is, is usually one on ten. So really of this then probably just one is actually a really good idea. Rails don't need to be a masterpiece, they just need to be content. So I'm going to shoot five of the east. And then when I have my five rails, I'm going to plan them over the week as a homework for this class, I'd like you to go into your saved sounds list and make a list of ten or 15 or 20 or how many refills you'd like to develop and just brainstorm ideas. You can be as specific as you want, as you can see. I'm usually pretty sure it in my descriptions, but if you want to be more specific in your descriptions, like put down exactly what sorts of action or at what point in the beat you want something to happen? Go ahead. It's completely up to you. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Choose your Artwork: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to talk about what to do when you have to prep an artwork or a piece of traditional art for a real. And whether you might want to choose an artwork that has already been completed. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Obviously. If you prepare an artwork specifically for a real, The good thing is that you can save time because you can just be recording footage whilst you're drawing the artwork. And you might also want to recycle that footage for other uses. Maybe not just reals, maybe your YouTube video or your patreons for your patterns. But there are also some cons. The biggest one for me is that if you end up taking footage of all of your artwork, pretty soon, you're going to be swarmed in footage. And footage nowadays, if you record it with a phone or if you record it with an actual camera, either way, it's super heavy because cameras and smartphones have gotten precise. With the megapixels, they create huge files. I found, especially working with embryos, that it's best if you just take small amount of footage exactly of the bits that you want to show. So for example, whenever I want to do an art reveal or an art process video, I usually end up finishing the whole artwork. And after I actually go back and erase some bits and just refilled it, I know it sounds like cheating, but it's just video maintain. Most of the times I like to do my artwork, I like to do my drawings in situations that are quite comfy. Working on the sofa, especially for my work for social media. I do it during my off time, so I don't necessarily feel like having a camera there. So the way that I've found, it's easier for me is that I will just work on whatever artwork I want during my off time. And then during my day of the week where I developed all of my reals, I will just go back into that artwork and erase some bits. Or because of the way that I work with my artwork, I keep everything on separate layers so I can just turn off the color, for example, go back into the sketch and keep drawing part of the sketch. So of course this takes a little bit more time because I have to go back and do things that I have technically already done. But at the same time, it makes me feel a lot more in control of what I'm recording, especially because I'm not recording a huge amount of hours of footage for nothing. If you're a traditional artist or you have a workflow that doesn't allow for this sort of cheating, Then I guess you do have to record as you actually go. In that case, it's important to remember, maybe not to record the whole time. And again, I am telling you this because our experience, it's very time-consuming to analyse and go through all the footage that you might have taken, just to extrapolate maybe 30 seconds of it, maybe 20 seconds, either. Set yourself a timer so that you remember every ten minutes to take a little footage, take a little snippet. And in that case, you want to position your tripod maybe next to where your painting. So that every ten minutes, five minutes, you can just play and make sure that you have five seconds or ten seconds of footage. Or you can just try and remember every time you hit a new step in your process, when you start laying down flat colors, when you start laying down shadows and highlights. At that point, remember to shoot maybe ten seconds of footage for the purpose of this video course, I have decided to choose a sound that I think can bring together the repetition and rhythm. But also show how you can take something from a different niche and apply to your own without necessarily make an artery review, the sound is going to be this one. I didn't want to work a nine to five job. So I started my own business. I worked 247. Of course, you can delete the profanity at the end if that bothers you or if you think that would bother your audience. In the next video, I'm going to approach how to prep the chute, make sure that you know exactly what you're gonna be doing. So there's gonna be different cats gonna be fun to plan it and shoot it for these videos, homework, try you think of an artwork that you want to feature in your real. And maybe choose an artwork that you have done before. And you still have all the layers divided up In your Procreate or Photoshop file. And again, little bit of advice. Remember to always keep everything on separate layers if your workflow allows it, we will come really handy when you have to shoot a huge amount of reals altogether. And you can't be spending all the time just drawing things. I'll see you in the next video to prep the shoot. 7. Prep the Shoot: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to share some tips and my usual tricks to prep the space and breakfast shoot. First of all, starting from those notes that you've wrote in your notebook or app, it's a good idea to make sure that you know exactly what's going into the real, aside from the general concepts. So in my case, I decided to use a funny motivational sound. Listening to that sound, I was able to identify different sections where I can make cuts. So the first thing when you prep your shoot is to identify where you're going to be making those cups so that you know exactly how many different angles or how much footage you need to shoot. Let's go into my specific example. I didn't want to work a nine to five job. So I started my own business. I worked 247. As you can see, there are four sections. If you follow the piano line behind the voice, you can hear where the beat hits. So I'm going to be changing cuts every time that there's a new section for those lines. So when it comes to those four sections, I could be playing this a few different ways. I could have four different artworks that I'm working on. And just have a close-up shot of my hand drawing on my iPad. I'm showing different stages of those five drawings. I could also have four different actions to perform that all relate to my small business, which means that I will make that sound a little bit more relevant to me. So for example, I could focus on one specific artwork and show a little bit of me drawing the artwork. The second location could be printing out the artwork, a close-up or a medium shot of the artwork. So the light coming out of the printer, which is always a really nice shot. I always liked that kind of shocked if their location could be this table again, the cutting, the size of the artwork to finish up the print. The fourth could be me putting up orders. For example, those four stages, for example, would work well in representing how much work goes into. Shipping out brings for passion rewards, for example, when you have decided exactly where your cats are and roughly how long your food that should be. In this case, the whole sound is ten seconds. So it probably means that each cat is around two seconds to second to, is really not a long time to shoot something. But you want to make those two seconds really count. And the visually, aesthetically pleasing and compelling so that people don't scroll away. It's important to make sure that your environment, your locations, are as nice as possible and that you have, even without spending a huge amount of money, that you have some nice elements in your stage. So what are some tips and tricks that you can use to make your stage a little bit nicer. First thing, plants, plants are super important. They are not that expensive, especially if you manage not to kill them. And you can just make more from one plant, they really brighten up the environmental urine. And you don't need to have expensive to furnishing if you have a plant. Also because you don't want the environment to take away from the most important part of the shot, which is you or your artwork. So it needs to be something that is nice and pleasant to look at and gifts. An idea of freshness and cleanliness, but at the same time doesn't take away too much from the main subject to cleanliness is also super important. I feel like cluttered areas and areas where you can see dust or things that are out of place. Really annoying, especially to me. This can definitely be maybe just a subjective kind of pet peeve of mine. But I feel like unless you are someone who has that sort of aesthetic, like you talk to your audience about how difficult it is to manage your house or you've got too many things to do when your apartment is always messy. If that's your Bible, if that's your voice and your character persona, that's totally fine. But if not, I feel like a messy area just takes away, again from the most important part of the shot. You don't need to have a whole house that looks like an Instagram set. You can just make up. A very small part of a room. The rest of my room doesn't necessarily look like this corner. That doesn't mean that the rest of the room is a dumb, but at the same time, it's definitely not as choreographed as I have choreographed this little corner. You can create several little corners in your house that you don't necessarily always have to use the same one when you shoot a real. Normally, the field of action is very limited. It's a landscape sort of scenario. And usually it's just to show a very small subject, either you or your iPad or a notebook or a sketchbook. It doesn't need to be a huge blank area. Very important. Always make sure to charge any electrical appliance that you need to use for the shoot. Your phone, for example. Or if you're using a lighting, set, your lights as well when you shoot, It's also super important to put your phone in either work mode or focus mode, whatever monitor that doesn't allow you to receive texts or other messages or notifications. This is because it's super annoying if you're doing something and then you get a text or you get some sort of notifications and you have to re-shoot something, talking about lighting sets and light in general, even if you don't want to break the bank, it's useful to have a liking set because very few houses or light enough, usually the lights that you have in a normal room are yellow lights, warm lights, and those kind of lights and look really bad when reflected on iPads or screens or anything on, on people. They tend to make you look quite silo. You want to get a set of light that has continuous white light. You can get a set of lights for about $40, I think, on Amazon nowadays. So really they're not that expensive. I bought mine a few years ago now is basically just a really big white light with a screen on top so that the light becomes a little bit more muffled. And I usually make sure that my set has two different lines converging. On one side, I have my bright white light with the screen on top. And on the other side I have a yellowish orangey light. That is my accent light. And you can buy that sort of light as well. They usually come with different colored glasses on top so that you can use green or blue or red, depending on whether you want to give a different hue to the room. I usually use orange because when my skin color I think is the is the color that. So to me best, the reason why I always say lights are super important is because since you're shooting with your phone already, the quality will be not as good as shooting with an actual camera. And the quality will be diminished even more when it's uploaded on Instagram and TikTok. So you want the quality to be as good as possible. And usually light has a huge impact in that so forth. These videos, homework, I would like you guys to check the checklist that I have put into the course materials and make sure that you have done everything you can to make sure that you're setting is a clean and nice as possible, and to make sure that everything has been charged and that you're ready to hit play. 8. Shoot: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how I wish you the example reel from my own class project. Let's start with the tools you need. As I mentioned before, I'm only going to be using my phone, an iPhone SE from 2020. And to tripods. One is an Octopus tripod that was probably around €9.1 is an overhead desk clipping arm. That is, I think around 19 Euros. These are on the cheaper side for sure. And you can get much more expensive ones. Definitely for the clipping arm, I would recommend you do. Actually, I bought the cheap option and the result is that it's a little wobbly since it's clipped to the same desk where I keep the iPad for drawing. If I draw too forcefully, sometimes the phone moves and the result is a little annoying. I have had to learn to be very gentle with my strokes. The Octopus tripod is that is totally fine. You can move the feet around and clip it wherever you need. The phone holder can detach and you can attach it to the overhead arm. This bit is usually universal, so it's likely that it will work on all your tripods, which is fortunate. So let's start with shooting the first seen in my real. First of all, I'm going to clean the screen or the iPad to make sure that there are no nasty smudges on it. Then the first beat in my real plummets says to sketch some lines from the Pride Month artwork I'm working on. I'm going to set up the first location. It is going to be a bird's eye view of the iPad, which I can achieve by placing the phone on the overhead bolder, facing straight down on the desk. I use different planks of wood to change the color of the desk and give the impression that I'm recording in different settings and different times of day or even of the year to add to the variety of the real and make it less boring. You can get these different surfaces in any hardware store or do it yourself store. And they're really inexpensive to get. Or you could even use a cutting board if it's in good condition. Check the angle in your phone and make sure that the iPad is within the shot, that it's centered and in-focus, you can turn the screen brightness down a bit so that it doesn't create too much of a contrast with the background desk. Around midpoint is usually good. Then you can hit record and shoot a couple of takes. I actually already have a clean sketch of this artwork, but for the sake of video making, I've colored, picked the same shade I was using for the sketch. I go over some of the lines. Remember, people will probably not noticed if you're not actually drawing anything new, as long as you don't stay too long on the same shot. Let's move to the second scene. I'm going to get rid of the lighter wooden board and use the actual desk this time. I'm also going to change the angle of the shot using the Octopus tripod to move to a lateral close up. Remember to set up this shoot on the opposite side of your dominant hand. Or you're gonna be showing more of your hand moving about than the actual drawing. My real plan says For the second beat, draw a line over this one, Princess fan art, which I have already finished. So I kept all the layers of this artwork. And so to prep it, I'm going to duplicate the finished line art layer. I have a backup, then erase some of the lighter finishing lines. These are the lines that I will redraw during the shoot. Again, I'm going to do a couple of takes just to be sure that I have enough footage. Moving on to the third scene, coloring a fan art of theory from the Witcher. I'm going to take out a new even lighter wooden board to change the shot even more. Sometimes I change some of the hand accessories. I wear rings for bracelets. Or if there's leave is visible, I even put on a sweater. This angle is pretty similar to the previous one. So I'm changing the background set and the accessories to enhance the difference is also the tilt of the iPad is different, so it should be fine to pretend it to color an artwork that was already finished. Sometimes I erase parts of the color block layer like I did for the line art in the previous scene. And sometimes I simply create a new layer and add some extra details like I'm doing now. In this case, I had to add the details also because I had flatten the layers of this artwork. So there was no way that I could go back to the flood color layer and erase it. Now, moving into the fourth scene where I show some drugs, it's getting hard to find new poses without switching location completely. So I have to become more creative. I think I'm going to switch the perspective of the shot so that the background behind it is completely different. It is one of the reasons why it's good to invest in a desk or work table in the middle of a room if you can afford it and if you have the space, you can move around it more and are not shackled to one side of it all the time. I'm going to try an over the shoulder shot where I'm showing my buck or parts of it. And then the iPad and the artwork in this beat, I'm showing a painterly artwork and me adding some finishing touches to the lighting. It should look very nice. What camera? So I want to tilt up the iPad as if I'm almost painting on a canvas. Of course, there are some technical issues. The first one is that my iPhone is older and cheap, so it's only got one back camera and cannot do the wide angle option that the newer iPhones can manage. So when I tried to place it on the desk or even on the overhead, older, the shot is simply not large enough to give enough context to the background to try and work around this issue. I tried to wire the octopus around a toll tripod that I usually use for the Sony camera. This is definitely not a very safe option, and actually, my phone fell off it a couple of times in the attempt. However, it proved to be quite successful as I finally got my arm and the iPad and some of the background in the shot. Again, do a couple of takes and you're done. If you're not bothered by the profanity at the end of the sound, is now time to record the last scene in the real, the part where I'm going to dab the sound itself. The idea behind this shot is to show me working away on another illustration. Then I raise my head all of a sudden and shout in realization that are now work a lot more than nine to five. For this scene, I recorded with the front camera because I wanted to have a visual confirmation that I was actually in the shot. My face was making the correct set of emotions. In general, if you're doing any dabbing on a real, I recommend doing it with your front camera, the selfie camera, or even recording straight into Instagram Reels. This is just so that you can be sure that you are dabbing it correctly. In this case, I can get away with not using Instagram Reels, but simply using my camera app because it's just one word. So it's much easier to get it right. Again, I did a few retakes to make certain I had enough footage and I was officially done. In the next video, I'm going to go through the footage I got from this shooting session and start editing it on Instagram Reels. See you there. 9. Edit your Reel: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, we're going to edit all the footage that I took in the last video and hopefully find out that everything makes sense and make an amazing real. So first thing I'm going to check out the footage that I have taken. As you can see, there's quite a lot of it. That's okay. It's important to take more than one shot because you never know what can happen if that shot is gonna get ruined. Better always to take two. For the first bit I'm going to be sketching and arsenal going to be working on for Pride Month. On the second one, I'm going to be drawing some line art over this moon princess artwork. On the third, gonna be coloring Siri, on the fourth, gonna be drawing some finishing touches on the button in which print. And on the fifth beat, I'm going to just have my face and that being the sound. So let's go to Instagram and tap on plus and then real. You can also get there simply by swiping left and then selecting real down here. There's a third method that you can use, which is simply go into your profile, your saved sound, choose the sound that you want to use. I didn't want to work. And then plus going to be adding in the footage. As I was saying before, we're going to be focusing on sinking the beats with the piano lines that are behind the voiceover. I want to work at night. I didn't want to work a nine to five. I think it's probably around two seconds to 2 second 3, the length of the first beat, because it's that beat with the piano that goes with that. And then it starts again. I'm sorry, by the way, by my terrible skills Athenian, I'm not a very good singer, but I do have some musical year one tip that I can give you guys to be able to better sync your transitions is to figure out which length each beat of the reel that you're trying to do is if it's 0.7 seconds or 1 second to two seconds, whatever. Because usually when music works in equal beats, so if you identify the first segment, usually the second beat comes with the same length. In my case, the first beat is two seconds to two seconds three. Then the next bit of footage, I already know that I've got to cut it at about two or three or two to see if that's true. Because that might be a fake assumption. Let's see. So I'm going to cut it here. At 22. I started my own business. Let's see, a nine to five job. So I started my own business. I didn't want to work a nine to five job. So I started my own business. Going to lengthen this by two. I started my own business. I started my business, I didn't want to work a nine to five job. I started my own business. Didn't work a nine to them and you can go back and add some more in my guys now, it's time for the CREB it now. Okay. And the last bit, 24247. Okay. I want to work a nine to five job. I started my own business. Okay, So it's all in sync. The first three beats are much longer than what, much longer? They are longer than the last one. I could try and change those beats as well. Although I think that they cannot work. So I'm just going to listen to it a couple more times. And this is one of the things that you have to get used to when you make reels. And if you live with someone or if you work in the same studio, someone get a pair of headphones because people are gonna get really annoyed that you could just keep listening to the same ten seconds or 15 seconds of music over and over again. And that can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately, you have to do just make sure that everything works. I think it works. I quite like how, especially when I'm doing the line art on this one princess hair, it follows that, that musical line. This is another one of those things that you can try and look for when you work with musical sounds. And not so much sentence sounds. Which is to try and look for bits that kinda like going sink, not just in terms of the beat, but also in terms of the musicality of the gesture. So, especially if you're drawing painting. Weaving, doing anything art related that has a nice gesture to your hands or your body. Try and make that gesture in sync with the type of music. So it's not really dancing, but it's kinda making the gesture as sinks and pleasing as possible so that it flows with the sound. And as you can see as well, if you look up here in the top corner of the real sort of edit screen, there's a little bit that is missing at the end. The sound could go on for maybe another 2.5th. But I just interrupted earlier because I my footage wasn't as long. So if you wanted to, for example, take out the profanity and the end of this video, then you can definitely do it. You just don't put anything there in terms of footage and it will publish the sound. That is it just a little bit shorter. Now that we're in the next part of the editing, it's pretty much just about the effects. I usually tend not to put too many effects on because when you hit Post already, it kinda makes the quality of the video a little bit lower. So I tend to avoid putting too many effects on it. Just, just a little bit. Use wipe, right? You can see all these different effects that are the same ones that you can find in the Instagram stories. I usually go for Oslo on all of my stories. So probably saying here, if you go on the free sparkles instead, you can find more like kind of heavyweight effects. As you can see, they can be quite intense course you can go into your search and just look for something like this one. Now that we're done with this part of editing and adding the effects, you can also add some text overlay. You could, for example, add the subtitles to the voice-over. Now, I work 247. You can also time the sentence to appear and you can just do it by grabbing and scrubbing this timeline here. If you're unsure where to stop the scrubbing, whenever there's a change in footage, you can feel as light vibration from your phone when it touches the new footage. So you can time it pretty well. You could also record your own voice over. If you go into the little note icon, you can see that the camera audio is 0. So my footage audio has been suppressed. Instead of the original audio is 100. But you can, for example, lower rate and then record some voice over here or some sounds effect. But of course does not something that we want to do right now. I didn't want to work a nine to five job. So I started my own business. Now. I work 247. 10. Post the Reel on Instagram: Okay, so let's move on to the next part. The cover is super important, obviously, especially because it appears in your grid as well. And so when he appears in your brilliant appears as a square. So you can go into Edit cover, choose the cover that you prefer. I might just choose this bit for my cover because there's no subtitles on it. And then if you go into the profile grid, you can just, for example here I'm going to lower it slightly so that it's framed nicely. That's it. Then the caption I would normally keep the captions short and sweet because nobody cares. I don't know if you've ever actually read the caption or Rio. You can put whatever. I usually just write something that either it's a funny remark or just something very sure, but that's very much depending on your voice and your relationships with your followers. Usually, the important thing is to break some hashtags in their Instagram. As of late has confirmed that hashtags still play a role in the reach and the discoverability of your posts. So you can use hashtags or you can use hashtags in the comments section is the same. So, yeah, usually I write something like I love my job as a freelance artist. And then maybe black art. And usually I put three dots there. So the hashtags that are a little bit separated. And I'm just going to put my usual hashtags. So my hashtag, my memo, everything connected to, for example, artist's life, artist community, art board. And so now you can either save your draft or share it immediately. You can tag people. You can also invite a collaborator if you're doing this with a brand or with another artist, I always add the location just because I think that it, it does get a little bit more views because he gets suggested to people who are also tagged in myLocation recommend on Facebook? Yes. And then either share or subtract. I'm gonna go we said drafting my case, I'm going to post it in a few hours when it's my primetime for posting. That's the whole process of editing the video. As you can see, it doesn't take long at all and took way longer to actually shoot it. But that's because we were shooting in five different locations pretty much. Usually, it takes a lot less time. They are a little bit more straightforward, but as I said in the previous video, I just wanted to give you guys Like a comprehensive view of the oldest different uses that you can make up exactly the same location. So I hope that you enjoyed this part and please do not hesitate to leave any questions in the question section of the class on Skillshare and to update your project with your footage and you're finished real. In the next video, we're going to see how to maximize the work that you have just done so that you can post the same real on other social media like TikTok and YouTube shorts. So I'll see you there. 11. Cross-platform posting: Hey guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to talk a little bit about TikTok and YouTube shorts. I'm going to keep it quite concise since the process and the logic behind these two social media is pretty similar to Instagram. Especially when it comes to real, YouTube is quite different. But in terms of YouTube shorts, they are pretty much just realize when you post a video on Instagram and you can simply download it on your fun. So let's go back to Instagram. So here I go on Instagram in my real tab, as you can see, you've got your drafts and then you got all your published reals. So I'm going to quickly choose a real that had a little bit of views. So this one had quite a few views of 14. Okay. Yeah, almost 15 k. I'm going to go into save to camera, roll them load without audio. You use this audit there isn't available for download. Okay. So no, you want the audio as well? So let's choose a different one. A lot of audio isn't available. Okay, so let's try it anyway. This one, save to camera roll. I don't like without audio. Okay, Save. Now I'm going to go into TikTok and I'm going to go into plus upload. I'm going to upload this one. Of course it doesn't have an audio yet. So what I can do is that I can choose a new sound. I'm going to look for Bridger tone music. And I need obviously some music that is at least one minute. Okay? As you can see, a good thing about, for example, TikTok is that the effects that you can apply are all here. You can press and hold to apply the effects visual motion transition. And you can also apply filters. But for example, with the filters, you have a slider, so you can apply it 100%. There is a lot, or just maybe 10%. I think this is a little bit more customizable than what happens on Instagram. So I quite enjoy that. So then you go next on TikTok. I usually don't even put any description. I just put hashtags. So I'm going to put all the relative hashtags to bridge return. Obviously. Lady bridge return violet region, drawing, art process. And then you can just select the cover. And then you can simply, that's your video. Now we're gonna go into YouTube and did the same thing on YouTube shots. To do this, you need to have a YouTube account and the channel, and then you need to go into the plus button down here, you can upload a video, go live, or create a short, which is what I want you to do. So here, I just selected the footage that I have saved in my camera roll. There you go. Then I can add a sound. Same thing. I'm just going to look up some Bridger. Richard can sound track. This is actually the same sound that I have on Instagram as well. Here as well, you can add some texts and filters, but I'm just going to leave it as it is a thing. Next, the details, I'm going to add a caption here. Drawing my favorite Richard public. No, it's not made for kids. There we go. When it's finished processing, it's going to be available. There you go. Now it's available. And you can also check out its analytics as soon as you have to shift. The good thing about YouTube shorts that a lot of creators have been saying is that by using shorts, their normal videos, and their channel in general is boosted. And they have noticed an increase in reach and interaction with all the other videos across the channel. So definitely it, since it's not like it takes any more work, It's always worth to repost your Rails or your TikToks, whether you post them first on Instagram or TikTok, cross-platform. The other platforms, it just makes sense because you have already created the contents. So you might as well just distributed over all the different platforms. So I hope that by now you're feeling a little bit more confident. Rails and TikTok. So I'm going to see you in the next video, which is also the last video and the wrap-up for this course. 12. Wrap-up: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'd like to just touch base on all the process that we have gone through in this course. I think the most important thing to remember when you approach reals or TikToks is that it's something that should be fun. Like most social media and social media marketing, if it's something that you're doing, but you're not really feeling it. It's going to come across whenever you have fun doing something, you are at your most creative and people tend to connect and enjoy the product more. Definitely, try and look for reals and sounds that connect with you and that you feel like you can do a good job with something that really speaks to you and that you feel like you have something to contribute to. For example, if your art has a funny, humoristic side to it, just lean into it and make a lot of reels that have kinda funny, humorous asides. Or if your art is very cute, very pastel colors than just really lean into that and make sure that your reels are all sweet and fluffy. Areas like anything else on social media. Duration of your art and your life so you can play around with it and have fun. Another really big important caveat as well is also not to put too much stress on yourself to create certain amount of Rails per week, or to put too much of your worth as an artist and as a creator on your ability to make reels. At first it's gonna be harder. And also you might not see the results that you expect from the start. So please just don't think that you're worth as an artist is any less. The algorithms that govern the social media are pretty much rigged against you because they want you to pay Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, maybe less, but they are all companies that want to make money off of advertisement. Of course, they want to spend money to advertise your Rails, to advertise your posts. And if you don't do it because you're a small business owner or you're a small creator, then of course, you're going to have a diminished viewership and reach their art is still good and your worth is still intact. I can promise you that. I would say that to streamline your real making process as much as possible, it's important to work in stages, as I've shown you through this course. Make sure that you have enough time each week so that you can scout for new trends, scout for new sounds. Every time that you find a new sound or that you just watched a new reel that you think it's funny or you think has caught your attention. Save it in your saved category, and write down your idea in whatever form you prefer that you find the most immediate match. Then when you have 1015 ideas, try and whittle them down to maybe 567 ideas that you can actually shoot. Pick a day during the week where it could be one day over the weekend or two different mornings, but I think it's best if it's just one day so that you can just focus all of your shooting in one day and get it out of the way. And then you can edit all of your footage and just save it into your drafts. And then you have five or six videos and save that in your drafts. And you can just post them one day or one every couple of days during your peak time. If you're unsure when your peak time easier route to read your analytics, I refer you to my Instagram course here on Skillshare, where I talk in depth about all of these things. How to recognize your prime time for posting and all that stuff. Of course, is a little bit old, I think two years old maybe or three years old. So there's no information on rails. And some of the information might be slightly outdated, but in terms of how to read analytics and stuff like that, it's still pretty much valid. Also, it has quite a few positive reviews and so don't take my word for it. I can't wait to see what you post on your project. I am really looking forward to seeing all your reels and give you feedback as you move through the stages of the real making project, please, if you post anything on Instagram or TikTok, do that me or DME. Just reach out. I try and reply to all of my DMs. Share your reels and share your work because I love seeing what you guys produce and I love sharing work with my students. So you can find me on Instagram or TikTok on YouTube over here. And don't forget to leave a review on Skillshare because that really does help me a ton in terms of visibility inside skill share. And also it leaves a good idea to other people who might want to take the course, whether they should take it or not. So please do leave your honest opinion. And if you have any questions or any doubts or you have any ideas for a new classes that I might create, please do just write it in the class comments and I shall address it. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this course was helpful, insightful, and made you feel a bit more confident when it comes to video making. I'll see you in the next course.