Ceros’ Post

🚀 Exciting Update from Ceros: Introducing the all-new Asset Library! 🎉 This isn't just an update; it's a transformative leap in how we handle and utilize creative assets, designed to supercharge your workflows. Whether you're a designer, marketer, content creator, or part of a dynamic team, the Asset Library is your new best friend. 🌟 Key Highlights: - Efficiency Boost: Build once, use endlessly. Save assets directly to the library and access them across all your projects in Studio and Editor. - Enhanced Collaboration: Share assets with your entire team, ensuring everyone is on the same page, literally and figuratively! No more asset recreation or lengthy searches. - Brand Consistency: Keep your branding sharp and consistent. With all assets in one place, maintaining a uniform brand look across projects has never been easier. 🔗 Dive deeper and see how the Asset Library is a game-changer for your creative workflow: https://lnkd.in/dtddj5W4 #Efficiency #DigitalInnovation #ContentCreation #TeamCollaboration #BrandConsistency

Is your mind full, or is it mindful? If you’re anything like me, your mind is constantly filled with new ideas. It's not a bad thing, but in the moment, a mind overflowing can be stressful. Here are three ways content creators can channel their thoughts into production: 1. Brainstorming and Mind Mapping This technique allows creators to organize their thoughts and ideas visually. By creating a mind map, they can jot down every idea that comes to mind without worrying about order or priority. This helps clarify thoughts and can lead to a more focused approach to content creation. 2. Time Blocking (one of my favs) Setting aside time slots for different tasks can help manage and execute ideas. Content creators can designate specific times for brainstorming, researching, creating, and editing. This can help turn a "mind full" of ideas into a structured, actionable plan. 3. Prototyping and Iterative Design Start by creating rough drafts or prototypes of content, then revise and refine over multiple iterations. This approach allows creators to get their basic ideas out first and then improve upon them rather than perfecting an idea before producing content. On my desktop, I have three folders: 1) Research, 2) Drafts, and 3) Final Edits Do you use any of these techniques?

Does chaos or structure work better on the creative side? It often seems that a creative person is hampered by structure, it kills inspiration As a creative director, I develop creative content all day long and 80% of my workflow is tables and whiteboards. Structure helps me to see whole in projects and don’t lose dozens of references in the save tabs. It’s a magic, but only one tool helps me have more freedom and order in the tasks. I use Miro white boards for: 💛 creation visual concepts and strategies 💛 building production processes 💛 planing a shooting calendar

Concept of the day: ‘content first’ prototyping. It’s more efficient, it’s more effective, and it helps you develop products that really work for your service users. In a new post on the Sparck blog Miriam Vaswani explains more about how ‘content first’ works. “It’s about basing our design on the information people need to complete the task safely and successfully,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that content design is more important than product design, service design, research or strategy. It means that the prototype is designed with content as its structure.” In practice, it often starts with sticky notes (real or virtual) being added to a board and moved around, or removed, as we gain more understanding of what users really need. That means you can do a lot of the complicated, conceptual work before you’ve even created a single visual. Find out more 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eJdFT4H5 #ContentDesign #content #design

Your post-production process can be your secret weapon or a puzzle 🧩 An optimised process will help you get your products live faster than ever. Without optimisation? Errors can happen easily and slow you down. Few things we delved into on the blog this week: 🛠️ The right tools to keep post-production on track 📋 How to use standardised processes to make post-production simpler ✍️ The importance of harmony between copy and imagery ⚙️ Top tips to make your process run like a machine Read our blog to see how you can unlock your post-production potential🚀 https://bit.ly/3ZMlt2Z #PostProduction #WorkflowTools #ContentCreation #WorkflowOptimization #LetsFlo

We had an inspiring design thinking session led by Jason O. Stevens, a dynamic member of The Content Well community and founder of SOURCE.how. He is developing a newsletter concept exploring the drama of work through “Black Mirror”-style stories. Our design challenge: How might we develop out of the box storytelling angles for traditional business case studies? Here are some highlights for the session, showcasing the power of collaborative ideation: 🧊Breaking the Ice 🧊 - Participants got to know where each other were located and favorite cuisines through an exercise called, Where in the World? - We warmed up by picking an ordinary object and coming up with 9 different uses for that object. My personal favorite ideas: a paint brush as a tiny BBQ brush or a finger splint! 💡Idea Generation💡 - Jason O. Stevens expert facilitation guided us to pick a story protagonist and a premise or scenario. Then, we came up with worst case scenarios. - The Golden Girls, The Witcher, Dungeons & Dragons, and a variety of sci-fi properties were amongst the group’s inspiration. - Our team’s collective creativity unveiled potential and possibly a few new Netflix dystopian series. Here are a couple of writers room plots we brainstormed: 🤖 Big grocer builds robots to apprehend shoplifters and Martha, our protagonist, has to resolve an influx of customer support bugs coming through to her engineering team. What if the root cause is the AI software is mistaking small elderly people as delinquent youths? 🥑 Big avocado creates a tracking app for customers to see the journey of their avocado from the farm to their table. Our protagonist, has to update the terms and conditions after seeing users interacting on the platform in unintended ways. What if the app is being used by the avocado cabal to take out their competition?   🌯Wrap Up 🌯 - The participants had so much fun and even went over time to flesh out some of the story plots. - Jason came away with really great ideas and info to continue building SOURCE.How. - Some participants spent two hours with us and earned two time credits from The Time Well, timebanking group. As for me, I saw a vision come to life: collaborative storytelling that pushes beyond the ordinary, mutually beneficial leveraging of skills, and making couple of new friends! 👉🏾 Join us in The Content Well community and/or The Time Well timebanking group to be part of such impactful sessions! It’s free. No gimmicks. Just time and ideas. Let’s collaborate, ideate, and innovate together.  #DesignThinkingMagic #timebanking #collaboration #storytelling The Content Well community: https://lnkd.in/g-s9ZZ5h The Time Well timebank group: https://lnkd.in/gy6SCZu2 

How I run a Creative Department as a fractional service: 1. Kick off with one monthly meeting I hear about the brand's initiatives and key objectives for the month. I help them develop a list of creative solutions that could meet those objectives, then work with the team to prioritize that work. 2. Planning and resourcing Based on the initiatives for that month, I put together a sprint planning document that outlines that month's creative deliverables. I estimate an effort level (Low, Medium, or High) which dictates the budget for that month. I then start scheduling individual contributors (designers, animators, editors, developers, etc). 3. Project management I keep the team in the loop on each creative initiative as it happens and manage the big picture of each month on a Trello board. I provide a mid-month document to provide high-level status updates. 4. Priority shifts If a project is blocked or priorities shift, I re-allocate resources in the middle of the sprint to focus on the updated priorities. 5. Ending the sprint I'll close out the sprint with a document that shows what work was completed and how it delivers value to the business (that the team can share with their stakeholders). I re-evaluate the effort level based on the month's estimate and assign a final level. If we estimated High but landed at Medium, I charge the lower rate for that month's sprint. I'll continue to refine the process as I test and find best practices, but so far, it's been a great starting point to offer strategic creative partnership and execution.

Mastering effectiveness and productivity - using AI to streamline product   Being clear on our purpose: Ours was to deliver what we do in 15-20 seconds to a 15 year old.   Our problem was, we do a lot and it took a long time to explain it in a way that was understood, we needed to clearly articulate our elevator pitch.   We used our website as a reference tool and ChatGPT to provide a marketing brief.   The marketing brief produced by ChatGPT looked like this:   15-20 second animated video to go onto our WordPress Website as a banner that plays straight away. Here is the website for reference, https://lnkd.in/gUrZ94J We are a professional services company - most known for leading large Government, Defence & Commercial IT projects. Our website does not demonstrate our points of value in a simple enough way so we are looking to show the following. - More than 50% of all I.T. Projects Fail - Forbes - We provide IT Leadership & Technical Expertise & Capability Uplift - Our Tag line; Project Success, Delivered.   Here’s a rough brief on what we are after; 10-15-second Ad: & quote; - Project Success, Delivered. Scene 1: (3 seconds) A person is shown juggling multiple balls representing different variables of large IT projects - Budget, Deadline, Expertise, Capacity Scene 2: (2 seconds) The person appears overwhelmed and stressed Scene 3: (4 seconds) A hand reaches out and offers a helping hand – Adept Scene 4: (3 seconds) The person is now shown holding a single ball representing a streamlined IT project with an Adept hat or badge on Scene 5: (2 seconds) A tagline; Project Success, Delivered. Appears on the screen in Adepts style and colouring. This ad aims to show the viewer the challenges of juggling the variables of IT projects and the stress it can cause, and then present our service as the solution to streamline and simplify the process, and ultimately deliver project success.   As mentioned we want to display that we are experience and trusted leaders in the space.   The script is below - could we please have the script appear on the animation as captions/ subtitles Script/ Captions: Stressed with your project? Juggling a deadline & budget? With limited capacity... or maybe expertise? Were here to help! Get Project Leadership from Trusted experts. Adept Technology Project Success, Delivered.   We went to a marketing hub to provide bids for our work. We then provided this brief to a content producer who created our ad. The ad was produced in under 2 weeks with minimal input from us.   The end result was we outsourced and achieved greater effectiveness. Want to improve your effectiveness? reach out https://lnkd.in/g_99EjG   #ai #chatgpt #effective #outsourcedmarketing https://lnkd.in/g5T57dqF

So, what sets creating an #InteractiveVideo apart from producing a linear one? Let's delve into the 4 stages of producing an Interactive Video. 👇 To keep the production process transparent, we've developed a model: the #IvoryModel. This model outlines all the steps during the four stages of producing an Interactive Video. Step 1: Pre-production Phase In this phase, you shape your video idea into a feasible concept and prepare for production. We divide this phase into three key steps: • Concept & Strategy • Flowchart • Wireframes Step 2: Production Phase After meticulous preparation, it's time to roll up your sleeves and enter the production phase. We identify three steps in this phase: • Content • User Interface • Interactive Programming Step 3: Post-production Phase Congratulations, you've entered the final stage of creating your interactive video! Here's where you infuse the magic of interactivity. Prepare for the post-production phase, which includes three steps: • Functional Test • User Test • Implementation & Launch Step 3a: Pop the champagne! You've successfully created an interactive video. Oh, wait, this isn't in the visual. 😉🥂🍾 Step 4: After hitting the publish button, you can relax with that bottle of champagne you just popped. But the beauty of interactive videos is that you can monitor and analyse their performance in your dashboard. All this data reveals insights about your target audience and aids in video improvement. So, be smart and maximise your video's potential by analysing and optimising. We've defined three steps in the optimisation phase: • Monitor Performance • Analyse Data • Report Client Are all these parts familiar, or have you discovered something new? Feel free to leave a comment!

⛰️ We've recently achieved a significant milestone in video creation, and we’re excited to share our feelings here: Since the beginning, our vision for LiLiCAST has been to provide an all-in-one platform where content creators like you can script, edit, post, and update your content seamlessly.   To simplify this process, we initially limited the tool's options to prevent the overwhelm of too many choices.   At all costs, we wanted to avoid what we call the PowerPoint syndrome :   When users are presented with a tool overflowing with thousands of options and presets, they end up spending more time fine-tuning every detail rather than focusing on their message.   𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁? 𝗔 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿-𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀, 𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁.   However, your feedback made it clear that we needed to change this approach, without steering away from our key values since the beginning: empowering anyone to make their voice heard through audio or video.   ☀️ This day has come: Today, our users can enjoy total freedom, like adding shapes and stickers, animate subtitles and/or add captivating transitions to your videos.   Possibilities have never been as legion as today! Start creating today: https://www.lilicast.com/