Oh hi Traveler,
Continuing on with my favourite takeaways from my time at Created in LA, presented by Disney.
The creators who are winning spend most of their time in pre-production. Not filming. Not editing. Planning.
It came up in session after session, from multiple different creators in long and short form. I mean, I was genuinely surprised at the amount of pre-production that goes into just one little reel.
Adrian Per (1.3M) said around 75% of his time making content is in the writing. Not filming. Writing.
Zack King (43.4M) walked through his pre-production process: idea selection, storyboarding, shot list, scripting, example rough cut. So much work, all this before the actual filming of the video.
Here's where you can apply it. If you struggle with editing, or with figuring out what to film and capture, and you're pouring hours into those two things, a real fix might be upstream.
A tight storyboard and script makes filming and editing easier. So instead of grinding through the parts you hate, get better at the parts that can help you speed up the parts you hate.
Vice versa can also be true. If you really enjoy editing, then you can just allot more time to shape the story in post-production. I did this a lot back when I was travel vlogging, where I couldn't do much pre-production since so much was unplannable live in the moment stuff, so I got faster and better at editing instead.
Now, this next tip is for those a little further along in the content creation game, since you need a bit more of an established audience. It's definitely more suited to long form, although short form can work too.
Sam Eckholm (1.8M) said something so obvious it's a little embarrassing more of us don't do it. Treat your uploads like events.
Think about how Hollywood launches a movie: Posters. Trailers. A premiere. Weeks of build up before you ever see the film.
Now think about how most of us launch a video. We hit publish and refresh the analytics. Upload and pray.
His fix was a one word swap. Upload and plan.
Here's the playbook, and none of it is complicated.
- Make a poster: turn your thumbnail into an actual movie style poster, with a premiere date and time, stylized text, and a 3:4 vertical ratio.
- Then cut a short trailer: keep it anti-clickbait (show that you actually did the thing), build a little tension, and add a custom title card.
Now, that might be a bit much for every single piece of content, sure. But the overarching idea still holds: we need to promote our content way more than most of us currently do. And there are so many other ways to go about it. (Almost all of us can get better at this one.)
And last, probably my favourite session of the whole event, from Jared Bush, the creative chief at Disney Animation (the guy behind Zootopia and Encanto).
He shared how it takes roughly 4 to 6 years to make one animated film(!!!). And even years into the process, they'll still throw out good ideas to make room for the great ones.
They'll cut a scene they love if it makes the whole thing better, even after three years of working on it. Wild.
Just imagine spending that long on a single idea on social media. It really puts it in perspective. But that's the mindset: foster an environment where you can throw away something you love in order to make something better.
Their line on getting unstuck genuinely stuck (hehe) with me: the worst decision is not making one at all, and the faster you make wrong decisions, the faster you get to the right one. It takes a willingness to take risks. You get it wrong in order to get it right.
And that is soooo true when you're a content creator. We're so scared our content is going to be bad, or not perform, that we don't even realize: it's okay to make bad content. Because by making the bad content, you learn how to make the good content.
That's a wrap on my Created in LA insights. Now go take these tips and start applying them to your own content!
Talk soon, 💛
Nadine
P.S. Want to see what the event was actually like? I posted a reel over on Instagram
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