Perfection isn’t the end goal. Connection is.
(Meghan Keaney Anderson)
Younger? What print media was to us older guys, video is – or should be – to you. As easy as using the excellent Filmic Pro app on your cell phone, and editing in Apple iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, both free. From here it gets complicated and more costly, like Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Adobe’s Premiere Pro.
The biggest technical problem to overcome is sound quality. Wind noise. Random noise. I was almost kicked off a movie set at Paramount for talking during a shoot, and I was 50 feet away from the cameras.
But this book is about making money as an artist, not the tech side of making videos. Your customers will be video creators, and they will seriously need still images for title frames, end frames, and ocasional in-between frames. For YouTube, that means a 1280x720 JPG, which is their preferred 16:9 aspect ratio. For Instagram, a 1080x1080 square JPG, to go with their square videos... which may change as Instagram handles more sizes. 2024 – Musk’s X is taking videos now too. You can get up-to-date frame size info from the different social media venues... like TikTok, which as of 2024 is becoming super important, with all the kids laughing at older adults’ attempts to cast it as a Chinese conspiracy.
Beyond making still-frame JPGs, art illustrations the editor can add here and there, what’s there for a graphic artist to do in video production? Well, if you want, you can become familiar with whatever editing software your client or company is using – and then help the editor with fancy animated titles and whatever special effects the program offers. And all technical, legal, and financial videos are stuffed with still-image JPG charts and graphs. And every video should have a JPG end frame!
You can be a real help without trying to take the editor’s job – which you don’t want, since then you won’t be an artist anymore. Here’s a start – famous Hollywood editor Walter Murch’s advice – like ‘Cut on the blink!’ Worth learning and sharing with your videographer.
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