Cinematic Podcast Intro for YouTube Video

This is a video that I had worked upon for the YouTube channel, Biblical Studies and Reviews, Stephen Hackett, with 38.4K subscribers.

I worked with him on several other videos already, but this was the most recent work. It gained over 25K views within 8 days, and a surprisingly high amount of engagement with 955 comments so far.

Stephen's topic of discussions can be considered quite controversial, which can easily spark tonnes of arguments and verbal clashes and debates among the viewers, leading to the high engagement. Keeping that in mind, I decided to approach the intro for a simple podcast video cinematically that he never expected to turn out to be this good.

Let's deep dive into the project now.

In the videolayers, the portions you're seeing labelled red is because I worked on those portions in Adobe After Effects. After Effects makes even a simple animation look buttery smooth, and whenever any potentially storytelling concept emerges in front of me, I end up shifting most of the visual work there. It's true that After Effects can be pretty sophisticated in term of its applications and amount of time invested, but once you get used to it, you'll choose After Effects over Premiere Pro sometimes.

People usually show you what they did visually to enhance a video, but I want you to focus on the sound designs instead. Because, the entire video is basically driven how you'd like to hear it in the intro, more than how you'd like to see it. The better you're at making the viewers listen to the start of your story, the greater you are at storytelling, and the longer viewers would be interested to stay until the end.

If you are now looking at the timeline's audio layer, you'll now notice the amount of sfx used in it. However, if you have watched the intro earlier, how many of them did you distinctly notice? Have I managed to blend the different risers, booms, whooshes and swooshes with the narration of the story? Did any of the uses of the sfx or any audio gap decisions break the immersion for you?

Rewatch the intro below, but this time, you have the timeline helping you track every contribution an sfx is making to enhance the story.