Speed Silver is a gaming YouTuber with 2.5 million subscribers and over 200 million total views over just 34 videos and I want to show you how to edit like him, what makes his videos so good and what you can take away to improve your gaming videos!
Don't like reading? You can watch this post as a YouTube video here!
For this post, I’m going to focus on Silver’s “Jurassic Minecraft Civilisation” video where he got 100 Minecraft players and split them into 3 islands all with different types of dinosaurs and if you haven’t seen it and that sounds interesting to you then you can watch it here.
And just a note if you haven’t seen the video yet I will almost definitely spoil it for you here so just a quick warning of that.
The Editing Structure/Team
But before I get into what we can learn from Silver’s editing I wanted to give some recognition to the team and so let's talk about them really quick. Silver had 4 editors help him on this video all with specific roles.
👇 Follow the Editors! 👇
But with this in mind, something that is actually quite uncommon is that Silver still did the majority of the key edits which was nice to hear.
And as for deadlines for the project the video was split into 5-minute segments for the team to edit one of these segments each week.
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As you can see by the video's timeline
this amount of time given really meant that the video doesn’t slow down after the intro and that brings us to our first takeaway which is consistency...
Consistency
Now when I say consistency I'm not meaning about the amount you post but actually in the video because I see a lot of people that put lots of effort into the first 30 seconds and then you see it start to slow down in how many graphics, subtitles and just overall amount of effort but not silver the video has a consistent quality throughout and this keeps us engaged the whole almost 50 minutes and not just for the first 30 seconds.
So this is an easy fix for your videos and that's to keep the same quality level throughout and if you struggle with this then do what Silver and the team did which was to block the video into sections (they did 5 minute sections but this will change dependant on the overall length of your video) but sectioning your videos will not only help you to make you feel like you’re making progress in your edit but also it will help you to set goals and keep up effort levels and not feel like you just need to rush to get to the end of the video.
Storytelling
Next up is arguably one of the most important and that's Silver’s storytelling. Now you may just be thinking okay "so what if he says it in a good way" but actually there's a lot more going on here because actually while it seems like there is only one story there are actually 3 stories of each island, all happening at the same time which eventually meet when the islands meet to battle and silver does a great job at intercutting to either show contrast or just to make a funny moment like for example when the kings are being picked we are shown two civilised votes and then that means that when we see the mafia’s fight to the death this comes across as funnier.
So what can you learn from this? Well if possible try to have more than one thing happening at once so that when the first is maybe becoming a bit dry and slow you can cut over to the other to re-engage your audience but just note that learning to do this will take time and practice so don’t just jump right in but actually plan it out and start off small.
Scale
The next point is a bit harder for smaller channels to replicate but it is the scale… Silver has a huge map and 100 players and the sheer scale of this makes us instantly want to watch more as it puts across that wow factor. It also shows us just how dedicated the this video speed is. This would be a lot of time and I’m sure money gone into this idea if they weren't sure if it would work and so this shows the viewer their committed and that this is going to be a good video
Now not all of us especially when just starting can have 100 players or plugins made for our videos but what you can learn from silver is to use scale in the planning and that means that you can spend time to make things to add scale to your videos like for example the huge map that was made for this video but we can also use large time scales like for example mr beast before he had large scale productions the large scale was the amount of time the challenges would take. I think the biggest takeaway from this is to just think what can you do to show your committed to the video and that this is someone who knows what they’re doing.
Animations
Now for something that again can be hard to replicate at first but the more you try the more you will improve and that is animations and there are a lot of them and I’m going to group them into two main categories which are “Actionable animations” and “Additive animations” now lets break some of these down.
“Actionable animations” are what we’re all used to seeing and theyre the calls to action like asking people to subscribe or like the video and silver uses some great animations that really help to spice up what usually makes us roll our eyes with a here we go again feeling.
“Additive animations” are what Silver uses to help tell the story following one of the most important rules “show dont tell” instead of just saying “so they begun travelling back to theyre spawn” (9:00) which he very well could have he instead decides to show us a map of exactly where they're going to not only explain better what's happening but also to keep us visually interested.
But how can you add these to your videos? Well to start I would recommend either making or getting yourself some subscribe animations. I’ve made some for final cut users which I’ll link in the description but sites like Visuals by Impulse and others make some great ones too! And then once you've got or made them you should start using them whenever you ask the viewer to take action. Don't make it too in your face but this is definitely a place where less is more! Now to add some additive animations and this may be a bit harder for those of you who are buying your animations as these will want to be custom but there are loads of great motion graphics designers on Fiverr and so whether you're briefing a designer or making your own here's what you want: "an animation that will help reinforce what is being said in the video as well as keeping the viewer visually engaged" because we all love things that move and quite frankly if we're watching a Minecraft video sometimes it's quite nice to see something other than Minecraft.
Conclusion
Well, I hope you found this post helpful, please let me know if you did and make sure to join the newsletter so you can get updates about these posts.