SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion explains how simple video special effects can dramatically improve viewer retention, particularly for short-form videos where the average time to capture someone's attention is only 1.7 seconds.
His primary recommendation is to use the free version of CapCut (desktop or mobile) to create attention-grabbing effects without needing expensive software.
Key points include:
• Use effects with purpose. Special effects should reinforce your message, not simply entertain. For example:
o Making money "appear" can introduce a discussion about earning income.
o Rapid movement toward the camera can emphasize speed, urgency, or how quickly opportunities or problems arise.
• Effect #1 – Object Appears
o Film with the camera locked on a tripod.
o Record footage before and after the object is present.
o Use masking in CapCut so the object appears instantly when you snap your fingers or perform another cue.
o Tom demonstrates this by making his SUV appear.
• Effect #2 – Rapid Zigzag Toward the Camera
o Record yourself stopping at several positions while moving closer to the camera.
o Leave the camera recording continuously.
o During editing, simply remove the walking portions so the video jumps rapidly from position to position.
o An enhanced version adds strobe flashes and audio glitch effects at each jump.
Tom emphasizes that these techniques don't require advanced editing skills, especially the second effect, and encourages beginners to start with simple projects before learning more advanced masking and visual effects.
He also recommends:
• Watching the examples in the Episode 1147 show notes.
• Searching for "CapCut special effects" tutorials to learn additional techniques.
The overall message is that improving the opening seconds of your videos can significantly increase viewer engagement, which can ultimately drive more subscribers, email signups, and traffic to longer-form content. Simply starting a video with a standard introduction is unlikely to hold viewers' attention in today's fast-scrolling social media environment.

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Episode1147 – Special Effects For Beginners
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1147 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about special effects and what they can do for your videos. And let's see, I hope you didn't miss episode 1146 that was choosing webcams so you don't spend too much money, but you get everything that you need. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to episode number webcams was 1146. And this one you'll probably want to watch over again. 1147 or I'm sorry, listen to it. But you do have to go to the show notes on this one to see the effects in motion that I created for you. Same thing. You go to screwthecommute.com/1147 and it'll take you there and then go to the show notes. All right, pick up a copy of my automation book. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Listen to this. Ha ha ha. I finished the book and it's now in the proofreading stage. So the new version episode three, or excuse me, version 3.0 is still the one up there. You can download that and get started because 4.0 is five times bigger than the 3.0. That's 225 pages. Now you don't have to read the whole thing. It's set up so you can go to specific chapters and do the practical section. And you don't have to read anything if you don't want to. All right. So watch for that coming out soon. All right. Take a look at my mentor program at GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.
[00:02:08] All right. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. So one thing that you can do to grab attention in your videos are special effects. And listen to this, the latest averages on hooking people to watch your videos, your short ones, especially not necessarily your long form ones is 1.7 seconds. Okay, so you got to get busy people. I mean, look at yourself when you're scrolling, how fast you're scrolling and what makes you stop, right? A lot of times it's not special effects, but this is something very well. They call it special effects, right? Because it grabs people's attention. So I'm going to start you out with two simple ones today. And it still takes a little bit of effort. You can do it either on your phone or your desktop. And we're going to use the program called Capcut. You can use the totally free version for this both on mobile and on desktop. It has a lot of other stuff you can do for the paid stuff, but you don't need it to do many of many of these things. So Capcut go ahead and install it Mac or PC and on your cell phone. All right. So we're going to start simple here. We're going to make an object up here. And then we're going to have you zigzagging extremely quickly towards the camera.
[00:03:47] Now a warning here. You don't do these just to do them. Just like when I teach professional speakers, you always use things to reinforce your point. So for instance, this first one I'm going to show you is called making an Object appear. And you just don't want to do it and then go talking about something else, right? So you might say something after you make the object appear. Wouldn't it be nice if money appeared? You know, let's say you had a stack of play money and you made it appear on your countertop. Well, you'd say, wouldn't it be nice if money just appeared like that? Well, it really doesn't work that way. Here's how you blah, blah blah. Right. See? So always make sure it makes a point or people will be like, oh, what was that? You're just trying to get my, your, you're faking to get my attention and, and baiting me and then you're not, it doesn't tie into anything. So don't do that. And then I'm going to show you one about zig zagging really fast towards the camera. And on that one, once you hit the camera, you could be holding your microphone and you could be saying something like, um, boy, wouldn't it be nice if things happened this fast in business or doesn't it suck that problems come up this fast in business. You know, something like that.
[00:05:17] See, because you're showing really speed and it grabs attention in that first two seconds. Okay. So basically what you're going to do for the the shot to appear and I'm not giving you the tutorials. There's tons. I'm literally, I mean, thousands of capcut tutorials on if you just Google capcut special effects, you will see all kinds of things. You're going to see more of them out of me because they're not that hard. But it does take a little bit of practice and going through the tutorials on how to do it. And one of the, the things you, you learn is called masking. So you have a picture and you have a mask over the thing that you want to appear. And then when you want it to appear, the mask, you take the mask off and it all happens. You know, in the video, you'll see these in the show notes for 1147. So you go to screwthecommute.com/1147. The first one is me making my suburban appear. It kind of reminds me of those, uh, magicians that make elephants disappear and stuff. All right. So, so basically I set up my camera on a tripod. I stayed just out of the frame, and then I walked into the frame and I snapped my fingers. And then I jumped in my suburban and I drove off. Okay, so that's the whole thing right there. And, uh, actually, after I drove off, I let the camera run a little bit and to see where the suburban wasn't.
[00:07:05] So to get a little bit of that footage when the suburban was not in the picture, and then you go into the editing and then you split it where you're, uh, as soon as you snap your fingers and then you put a mask on the suburban. And then as the footage footage goes by, I'm simplifying a little bit. The the mask disappears just when I snap my fingers and the suburban appears. All right. So it's it's like magic, right? So take a look at that when it's through screwthecommute.com/1147 show notes. And then the next one, there's a super easy way to do this one. So the first way to do this is put the camera up, get far away from it, and take some kind of pose or lean against something or it doesn't really matter. And then zig zag across, let the camera run the whole time and zig zag a little bit closer to the camera and take some other kind of pose or thumbs up or, you know, whatever, and then zig zag a little bit closer to the camera and do some other kind of pose. Some people, you know, sit on the ground or kneel or something. It just doesn't really matter. Just. And then zig zag closer to the camera and do it, you know, four, five times or something and end up with your face right in the camera.
[00:08:33] Okay. And then say whatever you were going to say. So then you take, you let the camera run the whole time, and then you go into the editing thing and you just cut out the parts where you're walking between the different positions and then it goes bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, and that's it. It doesn't take really any editing skill at all with masking and all this other stuff to do that one. All right. Now, so you see you're going to see example of that. There's three of them. You're going to see in the show notes at screwthecommute.com/1147. The last one is the same one where I'm zigzagging towards the camera, except it's a little bit more advanced because every time I switched positions, I put what's called a strobe effect. So it's like flashed at you. And then each time I switch positions, I put a little audio glitch sound. And so you'll see that. And am I perfect at this? No, but that was my first try on both of these. All right. So and they came out good enough to use. Okay. So so that's called special effects. And you really have to just start thinking about jazzing up your videos to grab people, especially the shorts. See the long form. Yeah. There's things you can do there too that we'll talk about in future episodes, but in these shorts that can sometimes get, you know, I have one that's 655 000 views, you know, that kind of stuff.
[00:10:13] You can get enormous numbers of views and that doesn't turn into money necessarily. But a lot of times you can link them to the long form and catch people and get people to subscribe to stuff and get your email list built up and all these things. But if you just start each video with hi, I'm Tom Antion and I'm the OG of internet marketing. They were gone five seconds ago. All right, so there you go. This special effects. This is episode 1147. Make sure you go to the show notes and you'll see these samples, and then Google Capcut special effects. And then you'll be there for days on all the cool things you can do, but you still have to get a little bit of training with the easy stuff to see how to navigate and how to mask and, and things like that. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. Check it out. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.