Introduction
Someone in a Facebook group recently made the anonymous claim (because they were too cowardly to own up to who they actually are when they said it, of course) that the podcast titles for this series are AI-generated.
As if!
Rather than get embroiled in an online argument, I thought I’d just fire up the tools which I used to create the intro in the first place and show you how it’s all done.
This short behind-the-scenes episode walks through the complete process, from the animated logo and moving typeface in the intro video to the theme tune recorded entirely in Logic Pro. Every effect, every plugin, every deliberate creative choice, and not a single piece of generative AI anywhere in it.
Tools used
MotionVFX “Promotional Opener” template (from 2016!)
If You Prefer Video
Transcript
Keith, you use AI to generate your podcast titles. That’s what I was told by an anonymous coward in a Facebook group chat a couple of days ago. I say anonymous coward quite deliberately because they used the group’s anonymous function, so nobody knows who they are. That is how sure they were of their position. However, the fact is I don’t. I don’t like generative AI. I don’t use it. And I thought rather than just say, I don’t use it for the titles.
I thought I’d show you exactly how they are generated. So here’s how I created the titles for my podcast. I created the video using my usual video editor, Final Cut Pro X on the Mac. Here you can see the complete everything that’s in it, and there is not a single bit of AI involved. So from the very start, we have a nice little animated Spin of the logo and a bit of firewall effect in the background. Then we have the bit which I suspect they thought was AI-generated, the moving text, because of course nobody’s ever done moving text before generative AI came along, right? Wrong. This is done just using a simple Motion effect. Motion is another part of the video creation tools on the Mac.
A Motion effect. I didn’t actually create this in Motion. No. This motion effect. I bought it from MotionVFX. They do a great range of plugins. I bought this one 10 years ago, long before anybody thought of generative AI, and that’s used to create the moving typeface there. Now you see there’s 4 different ones of it.
Reason being, the top one does the full The Overachievers Podcast. Middle, the other 3 do 1 word each, so that when you, when it scrolls along, we get the individual words – it just looked awful otherwise. And all I do, you can see over on the right-hand side here, the opacity. So you can see, let’s take for example this one, which is the. It’s opaque. It now becomes fully, sorry, it’s transparent. It now becomes fully opaque, which is why we see the. And then you’ll notice it’s gone back to fully transparent again because we’ve gone on to the next one.
And then we go on to the next one. So that’s how we just move between the 3 different ones, just flip between them. Then we go to the full one. The full one. And you’ll notice again on the right-hand side here, you’ll notice Transform. We basically zoom; in fact, we do a zoom out on it to get it to slide into place. And then we just pop in a static screen grab of the actual logo itself, add in a little explosion and a little lens flare. These are 2 effects.
2 effects I bought from a package back in 2011. A company that basically just creates various animations for use in videos. Again, absolutely not generative AI, certainly not back in 2011. A couple of little effects there. The background, just a standard background. And then we fade in, use one of the Final Cut Pro effects to bring me in there. It’s a Zoom effect, Smear Zoom, to bring them in, and then we add titles there. And the only thing that’s missing from this is up on the— Oops, sorry.
Up on the left-hand side here is where the title information goes, and that’s done in the actual episode, each episode itself. And then just a little distortion effect there, Ripple Distortion effect, which we use crossfade into the episode itself. And that’s it. That is all there is to it. Absolutely no generative AI whatsoever. That’s the video. What about the audio? Here’s how I recorded the theme tune for it. I did it all in Logic Pro, again on the Mac.
It’s the package that I normally use for most of my music editing, music creation. I used a couple of different soft synths. I used SynthMaster 3 and also used a Korg Wavestation plugin as the main bits. Used some drum loops created at different times in the past, and I used a couple of sound effects. So for the opening, for example, just the opening bit, it’s GhostHack cymbal transition and tailed with an explosion. And then we’re using SynthMaster For the little arpeggiated bits. Using Wavestation for the main theme. Again, pads done on SynthMaster.
Let’s just add… if we cut all of the rest of that, bring everything back in, then we end up. That’s it! Again, not a single piece of generative AI. used absolutely anywhere in the creation of any of this. The audio, video, none of it. All created by, well, yours truly and some plugins.
