Speaker A
You're editing your video, but then boom, a creative block. Well, today I'm showing you three steps on how to come up with ideas for your edit. And I don't think the problem is that you're not creative enough. You're just not
Tom shows a three-step method for overcoming creative blocks in video editing: curating your feed, gathering active inspiration from design sites, and combining references into original work.
Key Takeaways
- Curate your content diet before seeking creative ideas, since passive scrolling dulls creativity.
- Search for design elements rather than broad concepts when gathering references.
- Transform inspiration by mixing multiple sources instead of replicating a single design.
- Pay attention to typographic restraint: small, light fonts often outperform oversized text.
What the video covers
- Creative blocks in editing often stem from passive consumption of low-quality content rather than lack of creativity.
- Creating a burner Instagram account and interacting with cinematic or SAS edit content lets the algorithm surface better inspiration.
- Using 'not interested' on unwanted content helps refine the feed toward useful references.
- Diverse sources like movies, movie posters, and inspirational music also feed creativity.
- For deadline-driven work, active search on Pinterest, Dribbble, and Savee with element-based keywords (e.g., 'card' instead of 'UI animation') yields better references.
- Favoring static designs over motion references reduces the risk of directly copying an animation.
- Saving inspiration into a messy folder is acceptable; the goal is accessible raw material.
- Picasso and Cézanne/Braque illustrate that great artists synthesize and transform influences rather than copy them.
- A demonstration in After Effects builds a focus meter UI inspired by references but restyled, using layered effects like glow, noise, gradients, and strokes.
- Common mistakes include copying typography with the wrong font, weight, or size; subtle, small, thin type with a softer subtitle tone is often what makes references look good.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Overcoming Creative Blocks
- 00:30Step 1: Curating Passive Inspiration
- 01:30Building a Burner Account for Better Feeds
- 02:00Step 2: Active Ideas from Design Sites
- 03:00Searching Pinterest, Dribbble, and Savee
- 04:00The Picasso Story: Inspiration vs. Copying
- 04:40Step 3: Building a Focus Meter in After Effects
- 05:50Typography Mistakes and Font Choices
- 06:30Combining Elements and Closing Remarks
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
stealing well. Because good artists copy, great artists steal. We'll get back to that later. Let's start out with step one, which is passive ideas. Maybe you're like most and you just wake up in the morning and you scroll through your
Speaker A
reels and it's just Well, it is really in, out. Because if you're scrolling through brain rot the whole morning, then when you're going to edit during the day, you're probably not going to come up with a crazy good
Speaker A
creative idea. So, to get creative ideas, you need to fix what you're consuming first. Now, you might think, "Tom, this is so boring. I need something right now." Well, I will go into active ideas later, but this is
Speaker A
really important first. And there's actually a fix that will only take you 5 minutes and I will show you. You see, I get a lot of my inspiration from Instagram. And what you can do is just create a burner account. This is
Speaker A
basically just a new account, so you log out of your current account. You create a new account from scratch. Now, once you've created your account, you're just going to go to search and for example, search for cinematic edit. You'll find
Speaker A
all of these cool reels and what you're going to do is you're just going to watch a few of them, interact with them, like them. And when you do this on a new account, you will just see this content.
Speaker A
And you can do the same if you're into SAS edits. You can, of course, just search for SAS edits. And again, just clicking on a few of them, interacting with them. And that will make the algorithm work for you and just show you
Speaker A
cool work. But what if your scrolling and you still see brain rot? Well, let's say you are on this burner account and you find a reel that you don't really like. You just go to the button under the sent and you hit not interested. And
Speaker A
you can say doesn't match my interests and hit submit. And you can do the same thing for content that you do like, hit on that same button and then hit interested. And this is something really concrete, but you can also watch cool
Speaker A
movies, watch movie posters, listen to inspirational music. A lot of these things I just mentioned, you don't think of straight away, but it really helps with your creativity. But that Instagram method works so well for me. I just use
Speaker A
that in the morning so that later on when I'm editing, I can still come up with these ideas that are in my head because I can shoot them earlier. This of course doesn't help you if you have a
Speaker A
deadline right now and you need ideas now. Well, for that I have another technique and I'm going to explain that in step two, active ideas. Now, for the active ideas we can go to Pinterest, we can go to Dribbble or we can also go to
Speaker A
Save with double E. Now, you might know these websites already but a lot of people still mess it up. They use the wrong keywords because you need to search for elements. So, for example, if we want to make a UI animation, instead
Speaker A
of searching for UI animation, we search for card because we need a card. And as you can see, there are some really cool designs here. I mean, this is specifically a credit card and if you click on it, of course the algorithm
Speaker A
works really well. We see some examples that look amazing. Look at this stuff and also look at this. Now, I actually used this one for inspiration before.
Speaker A
The example is now on the screen. You can see I stole the design but I didn't copy it. I didn't use it for a degree counter and there's a big mistake a lot of people make when they steal a design
Speaker A
which I will go a bit into depth later. Now, Dribbble of course works in the same way. We can search for a card UI but we can also search for kinetic typography. As you can see, we have this
Speaker A
really cool design where the words are on the side but maybe we can use that or this as well how this is laid out. This looks really, really cool as well. And what I always try to do is not look at
Speaker A
motion too much because it's really easy to fall for the trap of literally copying it. So, ideally I just like to look at statics meaning there's no motion in it. And then lastly, we can also check Savee where we can just look
Speaker A
for UI. There's a lot of cool stuff on here as well for card UI. Look how beautiful this looks. Now, as you can see, this is for a home monitoring and I think this is a perfect example that we
Speaker A
can use for that word focus. We can just save this, same with the artwork that we had before and just put it all in one folder. It can be messy, it doesn't matter. And now that we saved our
Speaker A
inspiration, I'm going to go to step three which is putting it all together. But before I do that, I want to tell you a quick story. You see that quote at the beginning, "Good artists copy, great artists steal" is by Pablo Picasso. He
Speaker A
was an artist and he made some amazing artwork, but he was inspired by Paul Cézanne. And Paul Cézanne made artwork that included the Cubism style. And this was before the Cubism style was even a thing. But as you can see, Pablo Picasso
Speaker A
used those elements in his artwork. Not only that, there was another artist called Georges Braque who was also using the same style in his artwork. And you can see the similarities if you look at the artwork like this or if you look at
Speaker A
the artwork like this. They're not copies from each other, but instead they're inspired by each other. And they're a mix of different styles into this artwork. And that's the same thing with inspiration and it's also exactly what we're going to do now. I'm now here
Speaker A
in After Effects and I have these two images imported. Now, let's say my client is a home monitoring software. It would be too easy to literally just copy this and that's not great. Like don't ever do that. But what we can do is turn
Speaker A
this into a focus meter where this doesn't say home monitoring, but it says focus. And we can see the distractions that basically are influencing the focus. And instead of using this exact same style, let's use this style. So, I
Speaker A
cooked up a quick card that is somewhat resembling the style of the inspiration that we had here, but in the same shape of the other inspiration that we had.
Speaker A
And if you're interested, it's an adjustment layer with a deep glow and a noise, rounded rectangle with a stroke and a drop shadow that's being used as a matte by this pre-comp. And this pre-comp contains a cool gradient which
Speaker A
I just created by adding some shapes together with different colors with a Gaussian blur. And then lastly, a duplicate of that rounded shape that we used as a matte, but this time it's just a stroke with a glow on it, without it
Speaker A
and with it. Now, let's make the elements and let's look at our inspiration. And here's what a lot of people do wrong, they steal it in the wrong way. What I see so many times is people go to the text tool and they type
Speaker A
here, for example, home monitoring. They use the wrong font in the wrong weight, way too big and then call it a day. And then they said, "Hey, I looked at this inspiration and I wanted to make it look
Speaker A
a bit different." Yeah, you did make it look different. You made it look [laughter] And this was me when I started out as well. But there's a reason why this looks so good. This font is nice and modern and thin and then the subtitle is
Speaker A
a bit darker. You see this time and time again with a lot of designs that you see. This font size is nice and small.
Speaker A
It's not taking over the whole space and there's a reason for that. So let's see if we can get that the same way without looking at that design. Just going to go for a simple modern font, San Francisco
Speaker A
Pro. But you can also go for Montserrat, Lato, Touche. And let's make it regular or maybe even light. Make the font size nice and small. And now let's change this word to focus. Change the fill so it's a bit less light and this already
Speaker A
looks so much better, right? And then we can do a subtitle, my focus throughout the day. Let's make that a bit smaller and also a bit darker. Now let me add the other elements. Now I added a few
Speaker A
more elements, so five edits then two reels with the progress bar. Now of course this is really specific with a UI design and a UI animation. However, this applies the same with a storytelling edit. You take a transition from that
Speaker A
person, you take some colors from that person, you add the grain, you add the border, you find that specific song in a cinematic edit and you put it all together. Now if you want to learn even more about this then join the Fullstack
Speaker A
Editor Club. Cuz in here with every deep dive I go through the ideation process and show you exactly how I come up with my ideas. There's also a get a client guarantee. Check the link in the description. Of course, don't forget to
Speaker A
subscribe. We're almost at 100,000 subscribers. Thank you for watching. Thanks for all the support and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
Topics:video editingcreative blockinspirationAfter EffectsUI designPinterestDribbblemotion graphicstypographycreativity
