Using #RealTimeVFX: Social Media Promotion and Consumption

General Discussion
#1

As part of the promotion of the #RealTimeVFX hashtag I figured I should post about how to use the #RealTimeVFX hashtag.

Twitter

  • Search the #RealTimeVFX
  • :heart: tweets you like
  • RETWEET the tweet (very important for growth)
  • Consider following the user
  • When tweeting anything related to RTVFX use the tag.

Instagram

  • Search the tag and follow the tag itself (only in IG)
  • Browse tagged content and :heart: everything you like as you go through
  • Follow your favorite users.

Please post any social media tips tricks and best practices in the thread below so we can all use the platforms and the hashtag to grow together.

#2

I spent a lot of my career not really promoting myself as an individual artist but I have recently started to make up for lost time. Here is what I am doing to promote on social media.

Every day or so I generate a Tumbler post based on something I have done for a past game. I then promote the topic on Twitter and Instagram which I only use for outward facing posting (my Facebook is for the friends and family so I don’t flood it with these posts).

I have forced myself to let go of the only show your best work, portfolio style filtering. I want to tell more of the real story of my work life so if my kids or younger artists read it it has more of the reality of VFX creation for games. TBD if that is the best career move but so far people have at least told me it makes the content more interesting.

Here is my process:
Source videos and stills from the games and the net. PWN Youtube allows me to grab anything as audio or video quickly off of the site. Lucky for me loads of people take great videos of our games. I take all of the video footage and dump it into a Premier file. If there is a lot I will make a full rez video for posting on YouTube to embed in my Tumbler post.

Once I have collected the content I write the tumbler post leaving a note for any GIF I want to create as a visual. I then use Photoshop import video as frames to create GIFs under 3mb for the Tumbler page. I try to make a GIF whenever I can so my readers can pretend they live in Harry Potter world where every picture magically moves. After the post is written and checked and GIFs, embeds, and images are in place I switch to HTML and adjust the formatting to my liking. Tumbler tip: don’t change the post back to rich text after formatting or your changes will be lost.

Tumbler post completed I’ll go back to Premier and make one or more promo videos (max 60 seconds) for Twitter (16:9) and Instagram (1:1). If audio isn’t important will sometimes opt for a GIF on Twitter (max 5megs). I’ll post directly on Twitter from my PC and copy the text into a text file on my Dropbox. I also place the IG video in my Dropbox. Then on my phone I pull down the video and post is on IG copying the text over from my text file and adding the long list of hashtags I generally use.

The complexity of this process has made me look into Hootsuite but the cost seems high for personal use.

Anyone have better ways to do some of these things? Where do people usually make their GIFs when limited in size?

Here is my Tumbler and Twitter (go there and retweet my #RealTimeVFX post right now please :slight_smile:) and Instagram