Navigating the Short-Form Content Landscape

About the Episode:
Kane Kallaway is a content creator specializing in tech, AI, and cult brands with over 550K followers and 1B+ views. Founder of WavyStudios, Kane helps companies enhance their video content for audience growth and conversions. He also leads WavyWorld, a community/course on short-form storytelling, and shares insights into the creator entrepreneur world through his newsletter Blueprint.

In this episode of “Uploading...,” Kane shares his strategies and workflow for creating engaging short-form video content. He discusses the importance of creating curiosity loops, placing strategic hooks throughout the video, and tailoring content to each platform's unique consumption experience.

We discuss at length Kane’s content creation process, where he finds his ideas, how he chooses relevant topics and writes scripts with his unique angle, why rhythm and pacing are important in video editing, and how all these factors in creating an engaging short-form video content which then drives his audience to longer-form content where conversion happens.

Today, we'll cover:
- The importance of curiosity loops and strategic hooks in engaging audiences
- Crafting the perfect rhythm and pacing for soothing, engaging videos
- Tailoring content for different platforms and their unique consumption experiences
- Kane's workflow for idea generation, scripting, recording, and visualizing content
- Leveraging short-form content to nurture audiences and drive conversion to long-form formats

What You'll Learn
1. Short-form vs. Long-form Videos
2. Storytelling Techniques
3. Personal Brand Building
4. Audience Engagement and Conversion
5. Content Creation Workflow
6. Video Idea Generation
7. Video Editing Process and Tools

Timestamps
00:00 Kane Kallaway’s journey from consultancy to full-time content creation
03:44 Choosing a content type, topic, and platform for online growth
07:48 Content evolution, brand deals, short-form vs long-form content
11:41 Creating native short-form content vs repurposing long-form videos into clips
18:45 Kane Kallaway’s 5-step content workflow, from ideation to editing
25:12 How to hook and rehook the audience throughout a video
30:32 The importance of rhythm, pacing, and visuals in video editing
35:19 Kane Kallaway’s tools and software for video recording and editing

Short-form vs. Long-form Content: “The fragility of the audience with short form cannot be overstated. It's like it takes hundreds if not thousands of reps of a short-form video in front of somebody on Instagram or on TikTok for them to actually understand who you are and, like, buy into you. I had this framework called content minutes, which is like, let's assume for someone to go from a stranger to a superfan level, it takes like 90 minutes of your content watched. Well, if you're making short-form video and the average one is watched 20 seconds long, that's 270 videos they would have to watch to hit that bar and become a superfan versus a podcast. If they listen to the whole hour, it's like two podcasts.” — Kane Kallaway [00:09:27 → 00:10:05]

Newsletters as Content Idea Source: “So the first piece of finding what's interesting, I just am constantly scanning, and I find for the videos I make, which is like business of culture, tech stuff, email newsletters are the best place for me to find topics because they're already a curated filter on everything. So if I didn't have email newsletters, I would have to go to like TechCrunch, The Verge, Business of Fashion, Entrepreneur.com, whatever the sites are. I'd be scanning like 30 sites. And you can use something like FeedLIVE to do this, but I've tried it and there's a lot of noise, there's not enough signal, it's like way too much noise. And so what I find is email newsletters, people who have actual businesses designed to filter the bad stuff out, curate just what's interesting. And so I subscribe to like ten or twelve newsletters that I love.” — Kane Kallaway [00:19:48 → 00:20:29]

Video Script Structure: “Most people think of videos as like a hook, the body, and the conclusion. I think of it like a hook, there's a dance, and in that dance, you have context and conflict, which is basically just set up, rehook. Set up, rehook. Set up, rehook. You're trying to rehook them. Then at the very end, I tried to hook them again with, like, the ending so that they share it.” — Kane Kallaway [00:23:11 → 00:23:28]

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Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Ramon Berrios - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Kane Kallaway - Founder of Wavy Labs