How to Make Passive Income with Animation w/Apostolos Roussas

What is up all you cool cats and kittens? What is up? It's Thursday. Have you missed us? We're live again. We're like a little rusty, but I miss you. I miss you a lot. I really do. And I'm hoping that our co lockdown is almost at an end. I'm really looking forward to coming to your town and speaking at your local event. But we have a jam-packed show today and let's see if we can get through this. I'm managing a lot of different technology here. So, here's how it's going to go. Let's see if we can get this right. Let me switch over to this. There we are. We're going to be talking about something really super interesting today. And I just want to say what's up donation. All you futurists, the doers, you donuts, you know who you are. Today we're going to be talking about the business of animation and how it can help your business. Yes, it can help your business. And we're going to be talking about using animation to drive engagement on social media. But my guest today has been really good at integrating animation into his social media feed and I'm really blown away by what he's been able to do. I want to have those skills. I think after watching this and having a conversation with my guest, you're going to want to have those same skills. And last but not least, we're going to talk about how to make money with animation, both active and passive. Okay, who am I going to be talking about? I'm going to be talking to Apostto. He's going to be joining us in a second. And here's what I know about Abos. He's an entrepreneur, an animator, director, and chief strategist at Candy Mustache. His clients include Microsoft Coca-Cola Hasbro Village Road Show, Dixon's Hyundai, Coat Dior, Cosmo Media, Saturn Europe, just to name a few. And he's been twice awarded in VTO's featured author and VTO's Hall of Fame and Elite Group. He's also an official Adobe contributor. And and and he's the person who built this really cool animation for us. Yes. It's so cool. Right. Right. Right. So everybody put your hands together. Please help me welcome Apostles. How are you doing, buddy? Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello everybody. How are you, man? You're looking very professional. Look at you. It's happening. It's happening. I'm live, right? It's happening. Whoa. Insane. I love that. Okay. Well, first of all, welcome. We've chatted many times offline, but this is the first real, I guess, encounter we've had on social media, I guess, in terms of us speaking to each other. And I understand you have a little presentation that you prepared for us. Is that correct? Yeah, it's correct. Okay. Why don't I just turn over the show to you and let you take it over from here? So, let's start with some basic about learning animation. So, I'm going to go to my slide and I'm going to start with animation. It's easy. It's easy to learn animation and uh it's easy because you don't have to learn all the tools to animate things. For those who are animators and familiar with animation and follow me on the Instagram, they can tell that I use the same 10 tools every day. And I know that it looks difficult and there is a reason that it looks difficult. And it's the simple reasons. First of all, there's too much information out there. Uh all that information can leads to confusion. You know, different animation styles, different techniques, and it's really difficult for the new animator to gather all that information and create his unique style. But if you follow a specific style, let's let's say that you love a YouTube channel and you follow that style, you can start easy to learn and start working to the animation industry. And uh you can try both ways with free or paid and there are two paths. I'm not sure for that. It's okay. So let's go here. There we go. Okay. You can go with the easy or hard way. You know what's easy, you know what's hard way. If you paid for something, you can learn faster. There's a shortcut if you want to to learn something really fast. And I remember myself struggling to understand how I can create smooth animations. And I took this course about course about how I can create easy easing this technique that uh we'll teach in the course and that uh uh that course teach me a a really specific method that can create natural movement and make things look so smoothly. So one other thing is when you trying to compare yourself with others, you know, when you are new into animation, you start searching for things and you find all these amazing anim out there and you think that you're never going to learn to create cool things like this one. And uh you don't know the background of these people, the team, the time they have, the deadlines, the money and all the things. And it's it's it's really bad habit to compare yourself with with other animators. And with that with that I did myself also. I was trying to go deep from the first day. I was trying to create cool stuffs for the first day. And you know that's really difficult and uh this is based on the iceberg theory you know we think that these animators or these agencies they run all the time amazing projects and the truth is that to make a business profitable you have to run simply projects daily and is where the money is you know that of course is that where the money is at yeah on the simple daily projects So a cool advice here if you ask all these good animator out there and uh they will give you the same advice. H good animator is the animator who can understands the why and what's why I have to animate this logo in that way. Why this brand represents and what the brands want to achieve. Yeah, all these good questions will lead you to make the right choices to make the right animation. Now, imagine that color that the logo animation that you saw to create something really cool, dynamic, but glitch and uh you know really impressive that it will not suit the brand. Correct. It will be impressive but it will be out of the brand. So, I will grab all that information, throw it back to you, and I can hear your opinion for that. Okay. I've got a quick question in terms of your presentation so far. I notice you have some fancy type animation. Is that all pre-rendered out of After Effects or you using some kind of presentation software to animate for this one? Mhm. Yeah. Pre-render inside After Effects. I see. Very nice. Thanks. And I use a a really wonderful tool. It's a free tool named text flow by by my company Kim Mustas. And uh it's a simple drag and drop tool to create text animations. Really? This is free? Yeah. Is there a plugin? It's some kind of plugin. Okay. Beautiful. It's called text flow. Text. All right. So you want to proceed please. So let's go to the main point how animation can help businesses. Look, when you have animation, when you invest in animation, it's like stealing candy from a baby for me because it will set you above the competition because it establish you as a creative and powerful brand. We always see brands with video content in another way you know because we grew up with broadcast TV and our mind makes that connection the brand with video connect in a powerful it's a powerful brand so I will go with some daily examples easy examples how you can use animations on your brand for let's say quickly an animated intro or logo for YouTube channel. No, when we browse, we always try to find a video that will explain what we are searching for. Now, now lately I was typing or searching how to change diapers and uh first of all you will check for the thumbnail. you were looking for a good design and then the video you will open multiple uh tabs and you will continue watching the video that has value and I'm not talking about the content I'm talking about the quality the production value I don't know if you agree with that yeah I I think that has a lot to do with it a good idea poorly executed is like a Ferrari with flat tires. Yeah. So also you can we can go with lower thirds. These lower thirds and titles will help to follow the flow. When you say something important that you need the audience to pay attention, you can pop up a title or a lower third or a slide that will make the audition realize that is something that I have to watch carefully. Here's the information I have to receive. And and you know, when you watch a video, you want to find the information quickly. And maybe maybe YouTube had added this um this chapter feature lately, but still if you have titles and lower thirds, you can help the audience understand faster what you're looking for. Also, this PowerPoint presentation, you can present uh something impressive to your clients in your meetings. First, it looks like you care about this client and you have created entire met presentation only for him or her. Secondly, you will have all the attention during this presentation and also it will be easier to explain and sell your products. when you try to sell the product or service you want to convince the potential customer or client that is the product will make the life easier and you can use animation for that and there's it's really crazy psychology explanation I will go deeper into that next topic but there's psychology underneath that and also can help brands with um with exposure No, you can create video content. It can help expose your brand and to rank higher really fast into the Google search. For example, social media. All the social platform prefer video content. This is why my animated Instagram carels have such a high engagement. And now also there is the Tik Tok that you can post any kind of video. If you don't want to show your face, you can create a really simple animation and communicate what you want. And the reason you go higher on the rank of the Google search is because Google loves video. There's a lot there. Google loves the video content. And when you search for how to in the Google search, the first thing it will show you is video content from the YouTube. And this is why because one 33% of online activity time is spending watching videos. Insane you know and also we spend time on video tutorials more and more. This is why now YouTube tries to push more video tutorials on the search engine. It makes sense. So you want to continue with that? Yeah, please keep going. Oh great. So why can help animation? Why can animation helps you communicate the message better? I love that part because has some psychology there. So first of all, the obvious is visual. Bright colors and simple elements are pleasing to the eye which makes it easier to express and digest information. And there is another deep more psychological reason and the reason connects that to our inner child. Can you guess what is that movement? I don't I don't know play. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's more simple. It's uh cartoons. Oh, cartoons. Yeah. Yeah, we grew up with K animation and motion graphics remind us this wonderful childhood. This this amazing and this is why we love motion graphic. This is the psychological background of this and the animation connects us with our emotions into our inner child. This this is amazing. It's amazing for me. And this is why we say motion creates emotion because when we uh when we notice something is moving, we feel that this thing is alive and that creates emotion. You know when you see a a cat walking immediately creates emotions for you. Uh this is what we call what do with motion graphics. We can sell things easily with emotions. you know to sell things you can sell only with with emotions not logical right and also there is another uh psychological explanation on uh on this one and uh I can tell that I will do a research for that the difference between reading and watching. This is I can show you how powerful is the animation. This a crazy theory and um I can go with the with example. Let's say that Jonas is walking into the forest. He he grabs a flower, smells it, and smiles. Now we are four people in this uh room and I don't know how many on the on the YouTube and we have create different images for this uh phrase I described. Correct. Mhm. So now let's say that I create a video for that show you exactly the same thing. In this case, I will guide you what you feel. I want the audition to feel happy and free. And let's say if I reveal a slide with the packot for those who are not familiar, packot, we call the last frame of the of a commercial that we represent represent the product or the service. So let's reveal a packot with the title Chris. feel the experience of the freedom. Then I guide you. I got your feelings and somehow somehow I guide you. It's crazy. What do you think about that? I like it. I like it. So you're bringing the idea to life, right? This I think animation is a really powerful tool. Uh you can you can guide the audience. You can guide emotions. you can guide things and uh you can communicate your message. It's it's amazing how powerful is is the animation and the image and everything. Yes. I just want to mention to everybody who's not familiar with the postal list, go check out his Instagram. He is actually doing what he's talking about where you scroll through his carousels as you flip through it. You notice almost every single thing is animated and it's crazy how prolific he is. So go check him out. I'm gonna drop it in the chat below for the 400 people that are tuning in. Okay. So about the next thing um I would like to do this all together and uh I want your opinion for every slide before and after results using animation. So I'll present you one slide animated and while still images and I want your opinion for every slide. So let's start for the first one. Okay. For social media like what I do in the social media. Oh, I saw this one recently. Yeah, it's amazing. So, what do you think about this? Well, one one makes me like what what was going on there? The the rabbit is moving. So, it just drew my eye in and I was really looking at it. Yeah, it's crazy how you can grab attention. And this is I see these comments and this message all the time. How you create these things, you grab attention all the time because when you scroll down, you see immediately something that is uh it's alive and you want to watch the entire carousel. So, I'll go to the next one. I think you're gonna love this one. I do. I'm sure. Are you using dynamic type faces to do this? No, I just convert the the text to shapes and I animate the paths. It's a really really easy technique. It's nothing nothing impressive, but the result is impressive. Mhm. Mhm. I like it. So also this one I just make some shape animation inside the book. And I can say that also the right one grabs more attention. Right. I think the subtlety really grabs your attention because you're expecting it to be static and then all of a sudden there's a small piece that moves just grabs you. Yeah, that's that's a good point. You don't have to move the entire scene. Yeah, you don't have to create impressive things. You just have to animate small elements and uh it will look really great. But when you try to animate everything uh it's a little bit you know confusing. It's not the correct way. So I was ask Yeah, of course. Yes. Muhammad uh is asking how much time do you invest in creating your animated carousels? That's a question I always wonder like is this a lot of work for you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's one hour per day. That's it. Yeah, it's one hour. Oh, you are fast. Okay. All right. You got me. It's not exactly fast. I use the right tools. I have set the right workflow to work fast. So, and and before I start animating things, I know what I need to animate. I know what I have to do to grab the attention and I add more value into the first slide and the the information to the next ones. So, this is why it's so Thomas fast. I see. Beautiful. Yeah. So, this let's show some ads promos and this one I love It's about Microsoft. It's the the logo animation from the for the Microsoft Azure. And you can see the difference how impressive is to have an animation that represent this um this service and this this this brand. Very cool. Yeah, I love that project. And also ah this is a cool one because it's one of our products and on the left there's a steel image on the right is the an animated um let's say slideshow and it represents all uh the elements really really fast and you you can you can grab all that information in a couple of seconds. So I don't know have another one. Oh, you want to talk about how to make money? I I would like to talk about how to make money. Yes, please. Somebody's asking in the chat here already. We are waiting for this one. Okay. How to make money for animation. So, I'm going to start with the two ways active and passive. I know what you want prefer, but I will start first for the active. I know it's the hard one but so how you can make animation how you can make money from animation actively more if you are a new animator not so much if you work for for years uh first of all you have to start small checking small projects you don't have to go big with big brands you can go with big brands but you to go with huge project so I would suggest to start with logo animations it's something simple The duration of a logo animation is about three and four and 5 seconds. It's it's really small and you can make a good amount of money from a logo animation. Also, you can use you can go with explainers. I love you go with around 20 seconds explaining about the product and services. And also you can go intros for YouTube. I receive the same request most every day to create an intro for YouTube channels. And this is a good way to practice how to communicate and guide. This is really important and guide and help your clients because most of the clients are asking for long intros and this is going to kill their products and you can help the clients to understand that they had to go with small duration and a lot of information on a on a small duration. So the next one you can go with with titles. Titles that will explain the odds and what is watching. You can use that on videos for clients. And also some graphic elements. I use I love graphic elements in the in the video footage because uh you can attract the eye wherever you want. And I think you know that my favorite animated Instagram carousels. So easy peasy. You can create carousels daily and you will receive requests to create carousels daily like I do. I can I can think I can name about the number of requests I receive daily about Instagram carels but it can be around 10. I can say 10 10 new clients every days. Every day ask me to create a new to create animate Instagram carels. So you can learn create create upload them and receive the the request to create them. So are you getting all of these requests because you've been doing these daily uploads on Instagram? Yeah. Yeah. Track the engagement is is really high. I have a lot of messages, DMs and comments daily and uh people who run businesses, they want to to have this the same engagement. So they ask me for for these kind of carousels. Do you take on this way? Come again. Do you take on clients that ask you? Mostly not. Okay. Wow. So what happens to all those people? I know. Wow. Not because because I charge a lot about the to create something like this. And uh also I have uploaded a post that I explain how you can make money through how you can monetize your Instagram account with small charges, really simple things and not so much effort on that. Okay. There are a lot of people who Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Go go go go. Okay. Um, there are a lot of people who need to get work today that would love to be in your position where people are reaching out to them. I mean, 10 new leads a day, that is crazy lead generation and you're doing this by example, right? You're sharing your your ideas and you're animating the titles. I've seen your titles before. I see them all the time. I'm like, God, if I had more ambition in my life, I would animate the titles, too. But I don't have that kind of ambition. So, I'm I'm curious though, if if you were to give some guidance to somebody who's in the market space and they want to be able to animate titles for people who are doing Instagram, how much should they charge a client per like say 10 slide carousel? What do you think is a good rate to charge? Yeah, they can start if if you can start small about u $50, let's say. Oh, I think it has to be higher than that. It's got to be much higher than that. For me it's much higher. But if you can start, if it's just a beginning and you're just using let's say templates and uh not something really impressive and clients is difficult to pay to pay more for Instagram, they don't uh understand the power behind this this platform. So when you say I say about the 500 and uh the ice count Yeah. Not too much. Okay. Now, yeah. So, somewhere This is good though. This is good for us to talk about and open like this. So, somewhere between $50 to $500 is what you can charge to animate someone's uh Instagram carousel. And I think that's a business opportunity for you because if you can work every single day, if you do five days a week at let's take a number in the middle, let's say $300, you'd be making $1,500 a week. So, five times 300 is $1,500 a week. And if you multiply that by four, that would give you $6,000 a month. And I I think you could reasonably, if you get to the to the workflow that is talking about, you could do this work in a couple hours. Maybe you're not as good as a postal, so it won't take you like one hour. Maybe take you three hours, but that's still really good money. $6,000 a month for three hours of work a day. And the cool thing about this is whereas a commercial or music video, it requires a lot of skill, a lot of coordination, design, animating titles or adding some life like in the package that a postal did or moving the bunny so his head is bobbing left and right. I think that kind of animation is very doable and you can crank on these things on a daily basis and just start to uh refine your technique and your style so that you can charge more and more as you get better and better. So okay, good information out there. Yeah, sure. But also you can calculate about managing the clients. This for me this is the difficult part not creating the the content when you had you have to explain the client to clients what you're doing and why you do these things. This is the hard part and um this is why why we charge a lot of money. H I think most of the money go goes there to how we communicate and we are managing the clients. So it sounds like more of animation strategy. So once you've already got them interested then you're talking more about how you can go beyond just the the graphic side of things. It's like how are you helping them as a brand? Yeah. Well, when somebody comes and wants to to create any something for about Instagram, the first thing I suggest always is the Gary technique. I love that technique. So if you create a content for Instagram, so let's say you create an animated um carousel for Instagram, you can you can grab that information and um somehow convert it for YouTube, for Tik Tok, for Facebook, for every platform and upload it everywhere. This this a great technique to start with uh with the video content. So every time someone asks me for animated carousels immediately I suggest him to go with um uploading to every platform out there and I think for me it's a really good technique. Another question are you charging much more for YouTube introductions? No depends on depends on the project. the person on the project. Uh yes, maybe a a video, a actual video, animated video uh needs more time and more focus to be created. But uh also it depends on the project. Uh I can charge more about um yeah YouTube intros and uh I think the good money is on logo animation. Agreed. This rare. Yeah. Because you create this about the brand. It's like like designing a logo. You create something about the three or 4 seconds. You can charge more than 2K for any for every logo animation. Yeah. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you and some things I want to talk about, but I want to let you finish the presentation first and then because we haven't even got into passive yet, right? So, keep going. Yeah. This a cool part, the passive. So, let's go to the passive income. You love that one. I know. I know. So, so I'm going to share a short story about the the passive income and it was 2013. I was employee in the post house here in Athens. I was making a good amount of money and the the headquarters of this uh this company was based in Cyprus. For those one would don't know what happened in 2013 in Cyprus, they faced a really hard cut off of the bank accounts up to 70%. And you can imagine I was jobless. So I had to think somebody and I remember myself this day I went back to home and I cried like a little baby not because I lost my job because somebody else controlled my life and this is how I start working on passive income and searching how I can make passive income through animation and the first thing I found is video templates. So I start small from small marketplaces like 0.5 and then I jump into video hive and vat and I invest a lot of time there and um I create a really huge amount of templates I think it's about 100 I have lost number now and uh I become an elit author hall of fame awarded twice for best uh template and it's it's a really really cool way to to create money and it's for me I I don't know because I have this experience but for me it's really easy to create a video template it's nothing really fancy just have to find what the audience want the clients may may want and uh You you can you can invest a lot of time on video templates. There's a there's there are a lot of marketplaces out there more and more popping up. And this is what we do what we do daily here inside the country masters. We invest a lot of money on time money and time on video templates. So also I shared the post how to earn 1k monthly through animation from the first month. How what do you think about that? You earned $1,000 monthly through animation. Well, you saw those templates, right? That's great. It's it's amaz it's a it's a really cool technique that you can you can do on um on the animation on the video template industry because there are two ways the two different platforms the exclusive and non-exclusive and you can imagine if you create templates for non-exclusive plat platforms you can upload them everywhere and earn from every site and you have to create only once This this a crazy part of this. You have to create only once a template and upload it everywhere. And there are around five different or six different platforms uh that are not non-exclusive. And for after that the next shop is create your your your own shop is what we're trying to do now to create our own shop. when we go through this pandemic, we go we're going to we're going to launch our our own shop and the it's I know it's a next step and not it's a hard one but also you can sell things everywhere and to your own shop and uh grapple the money. And for the last one, I have something that's breaking news and it's NFT of course. What do you think? Uh I I think I think where we we hang up this um uh this this call I will go to my to my house and start searching for NFD because I didn't have time during this um this course production and it's insane what is happening there. It's insane because I think the most the top top selling products are animation if I'm not correct not wrong. Is that correct on NFT? The top selling are animation correct? Well, I don't know, but I know the top selling one is from people. That was $69 million. Yeah, it was animated, I think. Was it? No, I think it was animated. I'm not sure about that, but I I did a quick search search on the the crypto crypto art platforms and uh the top selling products was um animated. So, it's crazy the amount of money you can make from NFT. So, that's for me for the presentation. I can hear your questions. Okay. All right. a bunch of quick questions and I want to share a story with you guys because I promise everybody that's hanging in there, there's 500 people watching live with us right now which the audience has grown quite a bit. I think they're getting a lot of value from this. Guys, bear with us. Um, Apostle is Greek and you know English is his second language. So, just hang in there. There were some questions about like I'd love to take your course, but I'm concerned about his accent and if I can understand. Here's the beautiful part is it's recorded and edited and so it it it's it's very clear. Right now he's just speaking off the cuff and he's doing a presentation. So he has his brain has to work twice as hard as opposed to a very prepared presentation. Okay. And we got close captioning too. We have Thank you Mark. Thanks for for mentioning that. So they're they're subtitled so that you can fully understand and appreciate everything he's saying. Couple of quick questions. Question number one is what kind of hardware are you using to animate? They want to know that. So, cool question. For the for the course, I use a simple simple laptop laptop, not not something fancy. So, you for this kind of animation, you don't have to use something really really fancy. Well, my my main machine is really really expensive, the hard, but uh I I create this animation from a really simple simple asses, not something impressive. Yeah, I think people don't understand that this style of animation is not processor intensive. It's mostly key frames, understanding ease in, ease out, motion curves, things like that. And just having a really good eye towards moving the things that you need to move. It's not like compositing transformer, which has like 374 layers or something like that. So, it's not as computer intensive. So, if you if you can use a computer and if you can load After Effects, you you pretty much can do this work, right? Yeah. Do you need a really you need a simple simple machine? Yes. Okay. Here's the next question for you, which is when you're exporting your your files for Instagram, they want to know how big are the files dimension wise, and they also want to know what file format are you are you using? Well, I receive the same question all the time. It's insane. So, it's something really easy. It's MP4, but the technique I use is loop animation. So uh Instagram take this um format file and creates loop and the file size really small about one megabyte per per slide something like this. Okay. And standard dimensions like 1080 by 1080 or something like that. Yeah. Maybe a little more. Like 1920 x 1920. No no 1080 by 3050 something like that. Okay. Because it's taller. You're using the square, the rectangle format. Okay, beautiful. All right, I want to share a couple of quick stories and maybe Mark can help me read some or mark some questions for us to answer, but I want to let you guys know in 1995, I started a motion design company and I pretty much built a company delivering two types of things. Everything else we did didn't really make money, but the two things that made money were animated logos. In the industry for commercials, they're called N tags, ND tags. And for end tags, we would charge anywhere between 20 to uh over six figures. Uh so 20 to $100,000 to do a three to five second animation. We did end tags for Infinity. We did it for some really big companies out there. I'm I'm spacing right now for Microsoft. We we've done some really big projects. And so for that 3 to 5 second animation that happens at the end of each commercial to let you know who it's from, we would make those. And we used to do animated titles for commercials, too. This was back in the heyday when you could charge anything you want. We were charging $10,000 per animated title. So I was able to build a multi-million dollar business. So we were doing about $2.2 million a year just doing end tags and animated titles because we didn't know how to do anything else. That's all we could do. And and then eventually over time we started doing more things. But it it can be a very profitable place for you to do work if you do it for small companies on Instagram on social media. it. There's still money there through YouTube. You could do that. People need animated logos and things like that to brand their videos. And you're seeing that happen all over the place. The quality of the ones that I see out there are pretty low because they're mostly using templates. But if you were to have the skill to deliver a bespoke solution for someone, I think you can charge a lot of money. There's another gentleman on on Instagram which I'm pretty sure many of you are familiar with. His name is Dimafu. D I M A P H E W. And at the beginning, he was charging very little to do these things. And now he's so booked up. He's got weeks of work to do. And it's pretty crazy how he does this. So I I I'm could testify to the fact that if you learn how to do this and you do it well and you you post consistently, you're going to get more leads than you're getting right now and ultimately you may have more work than than what you can do. So that's when you you start to charge more. Okay. So that's that story there. Okay. Mark, what are some questions we can ask? Uh let's see we had one question regarding file types again. What are your thoughts on lah files? Yeah I think loif files are more for for websites not so much for Instagram and things. Uh I have tried couple of time to create lo files. It's it's easy and you can uh build your website with really impressive things and animation and uh if you want you you could try something like that but I'm not sure if you can make a lot of money from this from this industry because are more on websites not so much on the animation industry the actual animation industry. Okay, I got another question here from Capil Aurora. I hope I said that. Okay. They say, "Hi, if I've already done many courses on After Effects and Udemy and Invato uh Tuts and other places and have been working as a video editor for the past two years, will this course still be valuable for me? What do you say to that?" Yeah, this course also for the video editors. They can improve they can improve their their their reit with small elements lower thirds they don't have to to purchase uh templates they can create it by themselves and they can improve the way they present the the slideshow or or anything. We animation always always help to improve the quality the video quality. You can go one level higher every time you use something even it's a simple lower third or a title or a slide or or a logo animation or or anything. Or also we have a chapter about how you can bring a photo to life. So how you can take a still image and create like it's a really cinematic shot, add some movement and some camera movement into the shot and it's really really impressive. I think you can see some samples on the the promo video of the the course. Yep. I think that's really cool, too. I think it was made famous the effect from the film, the kid stays in the picture. Often times when they have documentaries and they want to recreate scenes, all they have are still photos. And if you can break the still photos apart and cut them out and separate them into layers and add a little camera movement and life, it can really make the shot feel like it was filmed versus being a static shot. There's value to that. Okay, Adrian Ban is asking this question. Is this only for After Effects? What about Premiere or Illustrator? I think I know the answer to this one. Yeah, you can animate things only inside After Effects, but also you can drag them inside Premiere because they are connected. So you create something inside After Effects and just with a simple drag and drop of this composition, you can have it inside the Premiere. No, now about illustrator, you we use illustrator only to prepare the files for the after effects in the correct way. So yeah, you can also use this for Premiere Pro. Yes, I prefer using tools that are designed specifically for the task at hand. I think you talked a little bit about workflow. Yes, you can fake the animation in Illustrator. Yes, you can do it in Photoshop and you can do it in Premiere, but the level of control, the precision, the ease, you really want to use a purpose-built tool. If you already have Adobe Creative Cloud, then you then you already have a copy or license to After Effects. It doesn't cost you any more to use and most definitely use the right tool for the right job. Okay, Mark, back to you. You have another question. Yeah, I got a good question regarding brand guidelines also. So, Kyle is asking um in static design, a lot of consideration is given to guidelines in visual language. Are there brand are there brands creating animation guidelines? So what's the question exactly? Yeah. So there he's wondering um you know is there guidelines that you provide for brands related to animation because a lot of people create you know like these style guides for static graphics. Uh do you do something specifically for animation guidelines about any brand that I have to to work? I'm not sure what he's asking for. Yes. Yes. for the brand. I know. Yeah. So, when you're talking about like brand guidelines, they tend to be used for static things. I I don't hear too much about like motion guidelines. As long as you use the correct logo, you don't stretch or distort it or ah no, I get okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I I mentioned that in the presentation when you this is this our job. when you try when you want to create something you had to create something that will suit in this brand. So for for example as I said the the logo animation I did for the future academy uh I think was yeah for the academy it will be weird to create something really glitchy impressive and dynamic. Is that correct? So I had to create something that will represent will represent that what this brand represents. So you can go you have to go with the brand. You can go you can you can go out for brand. You can you have to use the style of a brand if you know what I mean. Yeah. So here's the animated logo that Apostle created for us a while back that we're starting to to show and share with people right now. So it doesn't want to be like he said glitchy and weird cuz it's like this seal it wants to feel official and so it he he did a wonderful job of bringing this elements together and through his eye and through his skill and practice he knows what's going to work. I didn't I didn't have to say anything. I just gave him the logo. He worked with it and he came back. I'm like this is perfect. We love it. Yeah. I love this. Yeah. Good job on that. Oh thanks. Okay. Yes. Um, there was another question in here somewhere. Mark, I got one queued up here. So, um, you talked a little bit about, you know, how you charge your clients. Can you speak more about, uh, your pricing models? I'm sure you're not doing hourly, but, you know, can you talk a little bit about, um, you know, if you're doing retainers or how you do value based pricing for animation? So, uh, cool. I'm not doing hourly, but I always calculate hourly. This is the technique I use when I want to charge something and I have a price on my mind and I always in in the in that price includes everything like uh the rent and all the expenses of the of the business. But uh what I do is before starting the animation I calculate how many hours I need to create that and how many hours it will take to communicate with the clients and uh present them the results. So this is how I calculate and I always go a little bit higher you know I need that margin to for for reviews and uh things and changes this how what I do. Yeah and then also related how did you start working with these big brands? Cool story. So you you need to expose yourself this the only solution. You need to upload your work out there. You need to upload everywhere on Vmail. That's it's more for animation on YouTube on Instagram on everywhere and brands they come to you. This is for me this is how it work and uh when I start expose myself exposing myself I received a lot of request and uh also there is a fun story about Microsoft how I managed to work with Microsoft it's a little bit crazy because there is this um this brand from from Poland I think and they asked me for a video explainer it was an easy job really good amount of money I did I think h it went really good and uh after a couple of weeks I can tell I received a call from this uh brand and they told me that behind this brand is Microsoft and this this is like like a like a test for me if I can manage and create this kind of animation and they give me the entire campaign for the Microsoft of Azure. It was around 12 animated uh explainers and I had to do this for for a month. It was the deadline is only a month. It was crazy. Okay, there's another question in here from Partha who said he he missed so much from this video. Can we also have the entire video? Yes, this is live stream and as soon as this live stream is done, it will be up and you can watch it from the beginning. So, fear not. There's nothing to worry about here. Okay, Mark, any last questions? Uh because I I have another thing I have to prepare for pretty soon. No, no other major questions. We covered a lot of the good ones. Okay. Now, I believe that the course went live yesterday and we are still I I think there's a promo that we're still running. Is that right, Mark? Yep. So, the course just released, but uh until tonight, the price is still going to remain at the pre-sale at $99, but it goes up tonight uh at the end of the night here at local time. So, the link's in the description if you want to find that. Yeah. So, at 12 uh a.m. midnight tonight, Pacific Standard Time, the course is going to go up from $99 to what? To $149. So, another $50. So, if you're quick on the trigger, you can save yourself 50 bucks. If not, you can buy it at $149. We'll be happy if you do it at that at that price, obviously, but uh if you're thinking about it, I I'd recommend it. If you need more proof, just check out Apostal uh his Instagram account, and you can see the quality of work he's done, and you can get a sample of what the course looks like. It's very high production. It's all subtitled, and and it's broken down into like really smart chapters, so you can really learn and do something like this. and the world could use better, higher quality animations because there's a lot of really crappy ones out there. So, that's that's all I can say about that. Anything else, Mark? No, that's it. Okay. So, I'm going to put up this graphic here. Uh, this is a a postalis contact information. I'm going to try to butcher your last name. Is it Rousas? Yes, it's Rousas. Rousas. And there there you go. You can go to his uh website for more information about him. His Instagram account is there, Apostto Rousas. And and you can follow him. Definitely check out the really high quality work that he's done. I've always wondered how much time it takes to do the work that he does. And it's incredible that he's telling us that it's all done in one hour. It takes me longer to do static frames, but obviously I'm sitting there concernating over what I should say, what kind of images I should use. And bear in mind, he's quick because he has a workflow, but he also has a very clear idea and vision as to what the heck he wants to do. It's not like he's on the box monkeying around. He knows exactly how he's going to do this because he can see it in his mind. And therefore, he could do uh 10 slides like in an hour. That's crazy. Great workflow. And you had mentioned something called text flow. Where can we find more about text flow? Because I was searching for it. Uh they can search for text flow. They can go to the Candy Masters website and also we have included this one into the course. Oh, beautiful also to the Okay, if you buy this $99 course today, it's it's already included in it. So, you can get it. Otherwise, you can go to Candy Mustache and look up Text Flow and you'll find this really great helpful tool to animate text. I'm gonna look into this because look, I've seen people who do really great presentations when I'm out there speaking and they have a whole team of people, designers, writers, and animators to make these really beautiful presentations. It's just a little me making my own presentations. So, I'm going to look into this because I I used to animate back in the day. So, I'm excited about doing this. Okay. So, on behalf of the entire future team of both, thank you very much for doing this. Thanks for putting together the course and making it super affordable. I know it should be more than $149, but hey, we want to teach more people. So, I hope you got some value from today's show. And I want to remind you, here we go. Uh, if you want to become part of the the 1B minus one army, go to our website. You can also support us in a number of different ways, but you can send me money directly through Venmo. My bank account appreciates you for doing that. Thank you everyone for being part of the 1 billion mission. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe, and ring that bell for notifications. That's it for us. Do you want to play the music or do you want me to play it? You play it. Hard to get. I can't wait for you. There you go. Yeah. I don't have the iPad over here. All right. All right. I I'll do everything, Jonah. I'm just kidding. Good job, everybody. See you guys next time. It could be a long time. Who knows? We'll see you on the next stream. Bye. Bye. Bye. And so,