Seven Ways

Explainer Video

# Seven Ways A listicle explainer — the numbered-tips video, in the register a training or marketing channel actually publishes in. Fourteen scenes carry the whole arc: a title card, the speaker named over a full frame, a question to the viewer, the problem shown in footage, the figure that proves it, what it costs, the turn into the list, three tip layouts, a pull quote, the list read back, a call to action and an end card. The placeholder subject is a beginner's guide to running; the copy is a stand-in for whatever list you are actually making. **The look.** Two grounds — one dark field and one light panel — with a bright accent for labels and rules and a pale one for copy set over pictures. Lexend throughout: light for the display sizes, semibold where a word has to carry. Every scene is either field-over-picture or panel-beside-picture, and the film alternates between the two so no two neighbouring frames rhyme. **Eight colour schemes**, and they are real alternatives rather than eight tints of one idea: four light (Navy, Ember, Forest, Plum), two bold (Magenta, Crimson) and two dark, where `ground` inverts along with everything else so the panel scenes go dark too — Carbon on graphite and cyan, Midnight Lime on aubergine and chartreuse. Every one of the eight clears the contrast pairs the design stacks: type on its own ground above 15:1, body copy over footage above 8:1. **The three tip layouts** are the spine: centred over a washed full-bleed frame, a white panel beside a full-height photo band, and an outlined ordinal disc with the band mirrored to the other side. Duplicate whichever suits the next item — seven tips is three layouts cycled, not seven designs. **Six full-bleed scenes** carry a picture edge to edge under the dark wash or a directional scrim — the speaker's lower third, the figure, the stakes, the turn into the list, the first tip and the pull quote — so the film never spends long away from a photograph. **Motion.** Entrances only, and nothing keyed to a scene's end: lines rise and stagger, rules and the caption bar wipe from a scale of zero, pictures settle out of a slow push, and the ambient colour fields drift on long yoyo'd tweens that always return to their resting state. Scene boundaries are `transition`s, so they land wherever the narration actually ends. **Filling it.** Every scene is a layout (`meta.slotKey`), every piece of copy is a slot with a character budget, and the seven picture slots that are a scene's subject are marked `broll` so a workflow cuts a sequence against the narration instead of holding one still. The frames that are a portrait, a pull quote or a title beat stay held.