Creating Custom Animation Assets for Future Video Production

0:00I spent a long time trying to create this perfect workflow, this perfect S.O.P. for crafting emails, and I'm realizing that it was probably a wasted amount of effort. Not that we didn't learn anything, certainly learned a lot, but I worked really hard on it, and I'm kind of dissatisfied with it. The reason I'm dissatisfied with it is because when I look at the emails now, visually, they just feel generic, and I was trying to get my brother to do them, like to actually put the emails together. Steph is still the one writing them. I was looking them over, and then I was having my brother put them together, and then I would look them over after he put them together. And so what I try to do is say, hey, instead of you having to think about this, let me just create a plug-and-play version

1:01that you can just, you know, stick whatever you want in those slots, and no matter what you pick, everything will work. Turns out that while that works on a fundamental level, like while it actually gets the job done, it makes for a very lackluster experience, at least in terms of design the way things are formatted for the customer, and I hate it. And the decision I made ultimately was, oh, hey, I'm not going to have my brother focus on email, or do email whatsoever, because you know what? It's kind of my bag. And will I ever get somebody to do it for me? Perhaps. But for now, I am the packageer. I am the person who makes the things that the customer in the NCs. So for me, I just went, all right, did all this

2:10work, cleaned up everything? Oh, you know, none of it was wasted effort, I don't think. But I go, okay, I'm going to go back to the way I was doing it, which, you know, as long as I'm in control of it, it'll be nice and clean. And then maybe one day in the future, I can hire somebody to do this if it becomes like unmanageable, which for now it is not unmanageable and incredibly easy for me to do. And when I say unmanageable, it means that like I literally can't do it anymore. And what I realized is who I hire has to have their own agency has to be able to go, all right, I know how to design emails. I don't need your help. Although your input is valuable, but I don't need your help to do it. And I don't need you telling me what to do. I know what makes a good looking email. So, and I know how to read email stats and I know how to design, you know, like all that stuff, that's who I will hire if push comes the shove.

3:13For now, I'm that guy. I have that control. And you know what? It's, again, it's not one of those things that's very hard to do with that said. And it's not what this episode is about, because I wanted to start with that, because I felt like I'd spent so much time trying to fit design and creativity into a box into an SOP, only to realize that it doesn't belong there. Now, not to say that you cannot have guardrails. There are certainly guardrails that I even put on myself when it comes to designing emails. But there is really no substitute for I, for the human eye. And I say that because we are now up against another challenge, which is,

4:14okay, fine. I'm happy with doing emails. That's, you know, totally my bag. I'm happy with doing, you know, the website design. I'm happy with designing the app. I'm happy with the way I can make things look. That is really my job. I am no longer the person who has to create the content. I'm not really the content maker. I'm the content packageer. When it comes to YouTube videos, my only job is really, well, one, being the entertainment, being the, the, the a roll guy, right, being the talent on screen, if you will. And packaging it, so designing the thumbnails. That's my gig. That's what I'm good at. And I have a uniform branded look across the entire ecosystem. So when it comes to video, yes, I'm the packageer. But I am not the editor. I'm not the video editor.

5:23My brother is the one who's doing the video edits. But in order to have a uniform look, you still have to put guard rails on things. And I think this is not a, this is not a way to just make something very cookie cutter and plug and play or copy and paste. This is a way to get everything to look uniform, to get everything to look like it's part of a cohesive brand. And we were, we've, and what I did this past week and a half was I created custom animations for our videos. Now, this is something I have done in the past. And again, it's something right now in the company that only I can do. I've actually been talking to my brother. And I said to him, look, I can teach you how to design animations in After Effects. But honestly,

6:31I don't know if it's worth your time to learn. Because one, like he has a design eye, but he's not a designer, right? He knows what looks good. But just because you know that's something looks good, your skill level is not at it yet. So when I had a great eye as a kid, and when I started getting into website design, my first websites were decent because I had a basic, like I knew what looked like shit and what didn't. But if you go back and look at them, they, there was no skill. I was just kind of doing it by, by eye. You know, it's sort of like, the guitar player who can play a song by ear, but isn't very talented at guitar can just figure it out. Like that's how it, how it plays. And so now I feel like I have the eye, because the eye doesn't really go away. If, if anything, it gets more, it gets sharper. And now I have the skills

7:38to back it up because I've been doing this for 20 years. So now I'm like, okay, when it comes to video editing, like I've edited so many videos, I just, I have the skill, I have the eye, I can teach somebody else that. And I've been teaching my brother that, you know, through not directly, but basically like just through copying me and then getting better at the skill so to have editing, he is now up to, or I would say close to the level that I can to edit. But I still have the skills that he doesn't have, like designing animations. And again, I'm, I'm in control of the overall look and feel of the brand. And so therefore, my job is to make sure that everything looks good. And that includes the videos. So we're working on editing course videos where we've been, it's, it's, I'm recording this midfab, 2026. And we are about to head

8:47into pool season, right? March is right around the corner. And March is sort of the, the on ramp. April's when it really starts to pick up. And then May is like, we're, we're in it, 100% in it. And we are trying to build a new product, a massive new product from scratch. And not only do we have to build the product, but we also have to build all of the new marketing around it. And guess who has to do most of that? Yeah. So I shouldn't say most of it. So we have a team of three right now. It's Steph who is writing all of the course content. She is in charge of curriculum design. That's her bag, right? My job is to package it all together. So I have to worry about the,

9:47you know, filming all the individual videos and making sure they're edited correctly. And they have good animations and good visuals. And that they're uploaded to the correct hosting platform, which we are currently in the process of changing over to Thinkific as opposed to Podia. So this is like a big fucking shift for us in terms of just software, but also how things are sold. And it's going to be a mess, but worth it. And we have to redesign the entire sales page. That's all up to me. I have to design the sales video, a new sales video. Uh, yeah, it's going to be a lot. And we have we're about, I'm going to say two months to do it. Two months. That's not that much time. You know, and our book took like a year to, you know, a year to write and design. The reason why

10:49the course won't take as long is because a lot of it comes from the book. So a lot of the curriculum has already been thought through and designed. It just needs to be put together in scripts. And then filming is super easy for me. So I've already filmed like 12 lessons. And I think we're going to probably have about 40 when we're done. And I did that in a day. It's nothing. Uh, the problem we're running into and the problem, this is where this all stem from was, uh, editing, editing is a massive bottleneck. And really has always been a bottleneck for us in terms of getting out content, not short form content, but long form content. Long form content is harder to edit because one, it's just a sheer number of minutes. And it requires more visuals. It requires more, it requires

11:51text on screen, which are in our short form content. The only text on screen we really have is our captions, which are kind of automated at this point. And of course, we can get better at that. And I think that's where we're headed this year, which is I kept saying to myself, all right. I want these course videos to look different than our YouTube videos. But then I'm like, well, why would I do two different versions? Like, why would I create two different SOPs for editing? Just to visually look, it doesn't matter. The content is what's different. The packaging is the same. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to design reusable text animations and scene animations in 4k because everything we used to do is in 1080p. We are now switching to 4k because I film myself in 4k and a lot of our

12:55footages in 4k. And even if it's not in 4k, we have new scenes that we've developed so that we can mix and match, you know, images, you know, lower quality videos, higher quality videos, it doesn't matter. Texts, we now have new text animations. It's all good. So I spent, I guess it was maybe like three days because a lot of these animations I had built. And this is the big reason we use Premiere because I get asked like, what editing software do you use? And we use Premiere because one, I mean, I pay for Adobe and Adobe is not cheap. And I use it really just for video editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and InDesign. So I use a lot of products, but I'm like, I want to get my money's worth. So we do, we do Premiere plus the biggest reason is because it

13:59connects well with After Effects, which is the industry standard when it comes to motion graphics. There is nothing better. I know Dimitri has their own thing built in and I know it's like a node-based and that could be cool. And I know Apple has their own thing, but it's not nearly as good or as like huge as After Effects. And After Effects has this really cool feature called motion graphic templates, which are like short form, the short form is called a mogart. And basically what it is is you can create these animations within After Effects, within After Effects, you can save it, you can save those animations to your cloud, to the Adobe Cloud, so that your whole team has access to them. And what they are is drag and drop animations that can be customized within Premiere. So for example, I can create a lower third with text, right? And you'll see these

15:05in our videos. Well, that text or that animation with default text is designed in After Effects. So that it's smooth, it's got motion blur, it looks real nice, right? Then while my brother is editing in Premiere, a different program, he can drag in these custom animations, specifically built for swimming university, and then just change the text, like just right there. And it's like takes two seconds. And I go, okay, we can do this all day. We created our own custom transitions, with sound effects, we've created our own pop-up boxes, our own lower thirds, our own, you know, all these custom animations that we can just keep reusing and by reusing them, it makes all of our videos look like they're part of one brand. Not only that, we're using these for our course as

16:07well, and it's making the editing faster. And it makes it takes, it pretty much takes decision making out of the process. You don't have to design everything from scratch. You're just reusing templates. Now you still have to do like general editing, general cuts. And you still have to make decisions like, okay, should I use the split screen animation, do I use the title card animation, do I use the lower third, the info box animation, all these things that I just named, you gotta make those decisions as an editor, which is where the creativity comes in, which is where the eye comes in. But still, there are guardrails. But there's one more issue. And that is something that we had to figure out yesterday, which I mean, it causes another bottleneck.

17:09But there's a part of me that's like, I gotta get this right. Which is, I'm watching a video, my brother had edited a video. It was for a above ground pool anatomy. It was the lesson. And I'm watching his edit and I'm going, yo, it's passable. You know what I mean? Like I could, I could put it up and be like, all right, that's done. You know what I mean? See any other person, I think, it's like, well, you made a video and you edited it. Everything looks good. Sounds good. What else could you want? And I'm like, I want so much more. I just, I want it to be the best. So yes, he used, he used the animation. Some of them he used, his eye didn't, didn't, he can catch it. I had to get him to call with him and be like, hey, you use the lower third here.

18:12But see how this lower third hides this thing in the scene. So these two things don't work together. So I would have done this instead. He's like, oh, okay. And that's just like shaping the taste over time. I understand that not everyone's going to be perfect. Not everyone's going to have my eye. I have to be patient with that. I understand. But now we're at this process of like, I'm looking at these, I'm looking at these scenes that he's cut together. And I'm like, fuck, it's missing something. And it's missing custom animations. And I'm not talking about template it text animations. I'm talking about full on animations. I'll give you an example. So I'm watching this one clip. It's about, you know, the above ground pool anatomy. And there's a scene where I'm talking about how water flows through and above ground pump. How water comes

19:12in to the pump housing. It's being, it's using a sucking motion from the pool. And then there's a impeller that's turned by a, oh, God, just drew a blank on the name of the damn shaft. There you go. It's from the motor. And then it pushes the water up or over into the filter system. And I'm explaining all this. And he's just got me on screen explaining it as an A-roll. And I'm going, wow, okay. Yeah, we don't have B-roll of that. I mean, we have B-roll of a pump running. But it doesn't, it doesn't show the direction of that water flow. And so I'm going, okay, well, if I were the one editing this, which again, it's unfair because I know how to do everything. So I know how to animate. I know how to edit. I know how to do sound. I know the

20:18right music. I have all of these skills. I know that if I ever lose my job, I'm good. I've developed a lot of skills over the years. The problem is is that I have a lot of other skills that are not video editing that I have to focus on. Like I just mentioned emails and the website design and all that stuff and app design. That's what I'm working on today. So I'm going, ah, fuck, how are we going to get this animation? Because my brother doesn't know how to animate. And should I expect him to know how to animate this? No. You can just be a video editor. So I'm like, all right, well, we have to get the, I mean, do we have to get custom animations? No. But should we? Yes. I think it is, I think it's important that we do because it is going to help the learning experience. And they're

21:18reusable. If we get the animation done once, we can reuse it in future videos whenever we talk about pump flow or why you shouldn't drain an above ground pool, which is another one or how a multiport valve works in a sand filter. These are universal animations that can be reused over and over again. Yes, I know how to do these animations. The problem is I don't do animations all the time. I can get it done, but I am not the most effective. I'm not the most efficient. And so I will become the ultimate bottleneck if I'm the one who has to do them. Now doing these mogards doing these animated templates, I don't mind. It has an end date, right? I can do it once and use it forever, tweak it here and there. No problem. These are small animations. But big ones, I can't do all of them.

22:22I've done a few that we've been able to reuse over and over again. But I don't live in breathe in these programs. And so yes, I can get it done. But if I have to get it done all the time, if that's my job, well, that's going to take forever. So we do have to hire somebody for that. We do have somebody we've we've been worked we've worked with before. And we're just going to have to make those orders. And unfortunately, this is creating a massive bottleneck, but, but the work that we're putting in now, and this is I think, this is how I love to think about business is evergreen. The work that I put in for those emails to get that system set up, yes, there were things where I was like, okay, sometimes you need custom images. Sometimes you need to, you know, have a designer's eye in a very specific email, right? There needs to be somebody

23:29who is in charge of this, who can who can work within the guardrails, but it's okay to go outside them once in a while. That same person or that same idea needs to work for video editing. And that's, yes, we have our guardrails. Yes, we have the way we do things, but every once in a while, we got to do something crazy. We got to do something different. We got to do a custom animation every once in a while. And we need to hire somebody to do that. But again, any custom animation I do for the videos, any custom graphic I make for emails, they're reusable. Everything is evergreen for us. I have to remember that. And I know there is something, there's just something about doing it right the first time. And I, I, I'm channeling my, my uncle who would say this,

24:36and then my dad would repeat it. And he would say, my uncle would always say this, which is like, if you're not going to do it right, don't do it at all. Or I think you would say something along the lines of like, do it right the first time. You know, be patient, do it correctly. Yeah, it's harder that way. But you know, I talk about this idea of frictionless publishing and how, you know, we're just trying to get this stuff out the door. Yes, yes. But we do it correctly. It's not half-assed. It's whole-assed. It's done. And anything we do in the future to improve it works to improve other things. So we do it right the first time, improve on it as we go. We set the foundation. We build the, you know, we, yeah, we just set the foundation and make sure that it's solid. Do it right. Because then anything you add on top, it's so much easier.

25:39And I feel like that, that's how I feel about the books right now. That's how I feel about all of our whole tech stack is like this right now. Our app is like this right now. A lot of it's like, okay, fundamentals, the foundation, built, rock solid, anything we do on top of that is value-add it. Not fixing anymore. It's not fixing. It's it's value-add. And I don't know, that's all I got for this one. Let me know what you think. Shoot me an email, mad at jivinesi.com. We're just going to jivinesi.com, g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. It's also in the description. You can just click the link. That's it. I'll talk to you next time.