Nate Kennedy – Digital and Social Media Emphasis
Comic Book Mythos is a Youtube Channel focusing on the psychology of comic book characters and interpretations of storylines through the lens of understanding the why behind comic books. The brand serves as an entry point to deeper understanding of the medium and culture that has cultivated the modern mythology. The mission statement of the brand is to foster a community that understands why comic books and their characters have created cultural impact.
This Case studies highlights the creation of the brand from scratch and the content that was created during this period. I created 4 long form video essays, and created 18 Shorts that were repurposed from the Long form content.
Creating the Brand
Growing up, Comic Books were a passion of mine. From Spider-Man, to Batman, Avengers, and Star Wars I was always found reading comic books. As I grew older, I began to look at the stories being told more critically, and found a lot of joy as I understood the deeper meaning behind them. I knew I wasn’t alone in enjoying comics, but there was a gap of understanding why the stories were impactful as they were. Comic Book Mythos was born out of the effort to bridge this gap, to help educate those on comics, but also allow for a community for people that could come together to learn more about the art form they loved.
To better understand my audience, I created two kinds of persona’s. The first person in my audience is a seasoned comic reader that enjoys learning more details about their favorite characters, and are constantly looking for more things to consume. I hope to expand their knowledge to help them to discover new favorite things about characters they already love.
The second kind of person within my audience is someone that is a rookie within comic books. They have a lot they are learning, and will need help understanding some of the basics of comics reading and histories of characters and continuity. I hope to educate this audience and help give them a point in the right direction so that they appreciate more what they already love.
Goals
I created two goals to focus on within the brand. Goal #1: Create a community that understands why their favorite characters from comic books have the cultural significance and relevance they currently have. To measure the success of the goal, the Key Performance Indicator that was measured was watch time. The baseline to be achieved with this brand is to reach that 30% percent watchtime per video as that is industry Standard.
Goal #2: Foster engagement with the community where people can come together to learn from one another and find new things within the niche. The KPI measured with this goal is engagement rate. The industry standard varies based on content and niche. However, for a channel with under 15,000 subscribers, a high engagement rate is 1.63%. The baseline for new brands to hit is 0.05% and was the goal for this brand.
Pre-Production
To begin creating content, I started out brainstorming. I created a list of topics based on characters, storylines, and authors. From that list, I created a list of titles and ideas for thumbnails. If I could not come up with a compelling title or thumbnail, I would scratch that idea off the list. Title and Thumbnail play a significant role in packaging content on YouTube and creating good titles and Thumbnails would help reach the brands goals and KPIs.
After brainstorming and choosing an idea, came the research. My topics were thoroughly researched for the video essays. I would read storylines, interviews with authors, articles about characters, and general opinions about the topic. For example, for the Avengers Video I read the Ultimate #1-13, Avengers Earth’s Mightest Heroes #1-8, Avengers #1-2, 2 interviews for the creators, and an article about the Ultimate Universe.
All of that research was vital in developing the script. The scripting process was the most important process in the content creation. If the script wasn’t good or thoroughly researched, it was reflected in the final outcome.
Production
After the script was completed, I immediately went into recording. The Audio was very important. An Audience is more likely to watch something with poor video quality, if it has good audio. I used Adobe Audition to edit the sound. I added effects to get rid of background noise and to make the sound more crisp and used adobe podcast to enhance the sound further.
After the audio was completed came the editing. This was the longest part of production. I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit my content. I relied upon motion graphics to tell my story. I spent hours searching throughout the comic to find images that went with the script. I would also scour for video clips that went well in my production. The process was finding images, and then clips, and then putting them together on top of everything. After that was done, I added in music choices. Finding music that matched the tone of each section was really important.
An overview of my timeline and editing.
Since the majority of the edit came from images, it was important to figure out a style of how the images would move. I ended up using keyframes to create motion of moving forward, side to side, or up and down. The motion allowed for the audience to be more immersed in the graphics.
My favorite effect I used was motion with static images like a comic panel. I would cut up panels into multiple sections, and then have them appear as if you were reading a comic. I had the background move slightly as well in order to create the sense of motion.
The First Video that I created was “Why Spider-Man has to Save Everyone.” While I’m proud of how this video turned out, there were still improvements that could be made. The biggest improvement made was the effect of how I used quotes. I created an effect for reading quotes that had a bar highlighting the words as they were read. I think this effect was more engaging visually, highlighted the author more, and allowed for better retention.
Links To Long Form Videos
After the long video was done, it was repurposed to make into Shorts. Each Long from Video had 4-5 shorts created for the purpose of sending the viewer to the Long form video. Since the Video was made into sections, I could pull shorts from each section and repurpose them.
Links to Shorts In the Appendix
Post Production
After the video and shorts were created, Thumbnails were the next step of the process.. The Thumbnails were made in Adobe Photoshop. The Ideas were based on the title and subject matter. The process was to take composite images together to create the scene of the title. I used masks to cut out the characters, opacity to dim certain images, and then curves to make the images match in color.
Thumbnails
Finally the content was ready to be posted. The Long Form was posted first, while the shorts were posted over different times each linking back to the long form. Captions were created highlighting the specific keywords that were related to the content.
Results
The Average Engagement Rate for all 4 long videos was 2.8% with the highest being the Spider-Man Video at 7.2% and the Lowest Being the Star Wars Video at 0%.
The Average Watch Time Percentage was 24% with the highest being the Spider-Man Video 41% and the Lowest Being the Star Wars Video at 6%
Conclusion
It has been a win that the brand is reaching its goal in engagement rate. Most of the engagement comes from likes and comments, and most comments are the audience discussing with one another. There still leaves room for improvement to increase watch time up to 30%. Understanding at what moments of the content the audience clicks away and making changes to optimize retention will be a key factor in moving forward and building out the brand of Comic Book Mythos.