For those who don’t know, every month I release a new Skyscrapers puzzle book volume and put out a “book release” notification reel on Instagram. I thought I’d share the evolutionary process and how I landed on my latest reel.
My first reel was a re-upload of my first game trailer, created with video editing software. Years later, after a long hiatus, I settled on a cartoon-based comic style for my content. Naturally, a cartoon style steered me straight toward vector art and into the arms of the old animation software I love, Flash.
My initial intention was to post exported comic-style scenes as static images on Instagram, but the algo-gods wagged their fingers, saying “No no no no, we promote carousels ‘round these parts”. Alright. So I pivoted into doing carousel-style posts instead.
Shortly after that I heard a whisper in my ear at night saying “... but reels would be even better-”.
Thank you algo-whisperer.
After that new revelation, I decided to upload my individual carousel images on the Instagram app and have it piece a reel together. The process was much smoother than I thought it would be, however it placed inconvenient watermarks on the final version, so that was a no go. In the end I decided to use my video editor, begrudgingly, to export the final video and add audio via the app.
When the time rolled around to announce a new Skyscraper puzzle book I was in the mindset of “Okay, this is a physical book so it should be photorealistic. Most of the creative work was done in Photoshop and exported as individual images into the video editor for animation and processing.
Remember how I mentioned that I was begrudgingly using the video editor? Yeah... buckle in.
This PAID video editor ships with the following features:
Clip snapping always enabled
Only able to add transitions on the bottom-most layer
A composition-free experience
Drag to scale only, with no numerical input or feedback, keeping scaling a fun visual adventure
Auto-determined video length, with no in point or out point
A library of features you can pay to enable
...and the list goes on. It almost makes me miss After Effects... almost.
That said, it’s not without its merits and if you look at it through the lens of being a more feature-full version of Windows Movie Maker it’s even quite good.
Regardless, I managed to get the first book release reel out the door, with some minor dissatisfaction. But you know what? It did the job.
At this point, I had gotten so comfortable using Flash again that I thought, “You know what? Let me try doing a full animation for the new puzzle-solving tips reels.” So I created a few tutorial reels in Flash over the next month, replete with a growing library of reusable components. I would then use the video editor for some basic transitions and to export to an Instagram-compatible format.
The new process worked surprisingly well, and I continued to oscillate between two workflows; a photorealistic workflow, based on video recordings and Photoshopped images, and a cartoon workflow, centered on Flash animations.
Soon the second month’s book release peeked its head around the corner. I opened up the previous month’s project in the video editor optimistically, just knowing it was the better option. After all, it’s just a few drag-and-drop replacements, right?
Oh, so young. So naive.
As much as I love Flash, I had severe misgivings about actually using it for the reel as Flash does not handle photorealistic graphics or video gracefully. However, after tussling with those wonderful video editor features I mentioned, despite my reservations, I switched over to Flash mid-edit, trading the photo quality for a more reliable and fun workflow.
Being short on time I re-exported the assets from Photoshop and recreated the original reel style, with some minor changes to prevent the as much distortion as possible.
I ended up with an easy, streamlined, reusable flow; switch out the book, update the background color, change the volume number. Boom, we’re ready to go. Easy peasy.
Over the next few weeks I experimented with software to offload the manual character animation process. Just as I was getting into the groove of the new workflows, book release three whipped its head around and stared into my soul.
This time around I opened the previous month’s Flash project and breathed a sigh of relief. The book cover, background and text swap went smoothly and painlessly. At this point I thought, “What would make the reel more interesting?” After all, now that my workflow was smooth I could afford to be creative again.
I decided to incorporate some of the reusable animations from my puzzle tip reels to animate solving the puzzle on the cover of the book. Applying the transition from vector to photorealistic did take some time, but it was still relatively painless.
Finally, I had the reel of my dreams! Yet, something felt...off. It felt too digital, too app-coded; the intro just wasn’t giving off a physical product vibe. I hopped online and grabbed a vector image of a pencil to add to the number animations... It still didn’t feel quite right. I realized that I needed a more realistic, human look, even if it introduced another photorealistic-management challenge.
Let me tell you, the levels of slop I encountered in my local workflow trying to get a passable human hand holding a writing utensil... epic. The hand only appears a few times in the animation to write numbers on the puzzle grid, but I think the effort was worth it.
Finally, I threw my animated characters in the corner using the video editor’s god-level chroma-keying feature.
“And that, as they say, is that.” - Maechen
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