Reminder: We’re giving away a DJI Osmo Nano to the winner of this month’s ‘Creator Challenge’. With a small (but quickly growing) pool of members, your odds of winning are genuinely high if you join.
Clock is ticking though, don’t procrastinate!
Further down, you'll find this week's 'Short-Form Outliers', an analysis of trending videos my team and I put together for Film and Flow Premium members—handpicked for the techniques most useful to creators right now.
What you’ll learn about in today’s edition:
A psychological trigger in human behaviour that a creator used to get 28,571x their usual views (Video #1).
How an easy-to-replicate video format makes viewers feel like they’re seeing something they weren’t supposed to see (and how it was used across two videos in this week’s edition for very different results).
On one hand, it made a product video go viral (Video #3), even though the content of the video has nothing to do with the product itself.
On the other, it was used to force viewers into one of two completely opposite reactions (Video #2), both making the video extremely shareable.
How to use AI to find content ideas that are already proven to work in your niche (Video #1).
The storytelling device that makes your stories more memorable and convinces people they're hearing something true (regardless of the subject) (Video #3).
Recently. I looked at a post that had done well and realised I'd never touched it again.
Never rewritten it. Never reframed it. Never even asked why it worked.
Just posted… and moved on.
Which is strange, if you think about it. Because that post already did the hard part. It proved something landed.
But instead of using that, I went back to guessing again.
New idea. New post. No certainty.
And I see this happen all the time.
A post performs, and instead of going deeper on it, people leave it behind.
I’ve been talking about this quite a bit because it’s a key unlock for getting past the beginner stage, so I want to slow that moment down, because what you do after something works is where most of the leverage actually is.
The only time you have proof—real proof—that something connects with people, is
when it already has
A successful post already showed you:
The idea resonates
The framing works
The message lands
And instead of building on that, most people reset. Go back to zero and try to guess again.
That’s the part that changed for me.
Creating content no longer feels random because I’m not always relying on new ideas every single time. I’m instead building on what already worked… because I know it works.
Another way to develop this instinct is to filter your content with the three E’s, which I’ve mentioned here before: Emotional. Entertaining. Educational. If a post doesn’t hit at least one, I'll repurpose it.
You have to understand why people watch your stuff. For me, I know I'm not the best looking guy. I'm not the most entertaining guy. I'm not as funny as a lot of people. So the funny part and the good looking part—that's not my strong suit. But educational is easier because it's just about looking at what people need. When I make content, I think about what I can do to help someone. That's basically it.
Please Note: Film and Flow Premium could see a price increase soon. Not only to reflect the added value we've been bringing with 'Short-Form Outliers', but also to cover tangible data retrieval and analysis costs involved in putting each edition together for you.
For context, some websites charge around $30 for a single report about trending content. Aside from being overpriced, the raw data you get from these sites without any interpretation gives you little to work with.
But Film and Flow Premium members get someone who is actively growing their own account (394k followers in two years) to do that research for them — with analysis and prompts to adapt each video for their own niche — for less than 50 cents a day.
Not to mention eligibility to compete for prizes during contests like the one we’re currently running, for a DJI Osmo Nano (worth $350).
All that to say, if you've been on the fence about joining, now is the best time.
Members also get access to my full resource vault which includes LUTs, overlays, my Cinematic Transitions Mini-Course and access to custom feedback.
Short-Form Outliers (Edition #4)
Video #1 – Double Standard
8.4M views, 1.5M likes, 9923 comments, 30.9K saves, 92.9K shares.
Outlier Score: 28,571× typical posts!
The ‘Outlier Score’ is a measure of how many times more views this got vs. the creator’s usual posts. And this video just took over the #1 spot in the ‘Outliers Hall of Fame’!
It’s because it taps into a human instinct much older than social media.
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