Creative Experiments: A 00:30 spot for LinkedIn

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Cover stories are seldom seen. I made one anyway. Here’s how.

 
 

For starters, I decided not to make my ‘Cover Story’ a talking head video. A still image of my mug is more than enough. 

My approach was to create a no-audio clip featuring personal images, supers, and a DIY graphic. The goal is to provide visitors with a summary of who I am, what I do, and brief perspective that might help them get unstuck. Spoiler: Stories add value and you should tell them more and better. 

Ingredients:

  • Final Cut Pro X (my preferred video editing software)

  • Canva for arrow and line graphics

  • Photos

  • Enough time to iterate

Constraints:

  • Cover stories on LI must be < 30 seconds

  • Pre-roll (e.g. the segment that autoplays upon page load) is approximately 3 seconds. I wanted to get the timing of this juuuust right: so the jump to additional content would happen after the 3 second pre-roll.   

  • Vertical/portrait orientation only

Result: 

 
 

That’s it. Production time: 2 hours.

Some of you may be thinking ‘2 hours…that’s a lot of time!?’ A: not really (I know my way around FCP) and it was well-invested.  

To be clear, a Cover Story is not an act of daring. It’s just one more way to try a new software feature and be unique. Because, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss:

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”   

And because we all have places to go.