After my last project, I’ve been far more inspired to make video content. Most of my previous projects have focused on expanding my graphic design skills and photography skills, so for my personal projects this time, I want to focus on short video content. 

 

Several projects I have been working on so far relied on using computers. After my last video editing fiasco with Premier Pro’s constant crashes and the several hours it took for me to complete, I started looking into different options. Realistically, if I were to make content on social media, would I have this much time for several videos? I decided to challenge myself to make a video solely using phone apps. 

 

During my trip in Korea, I had already started experimenting with simple video editing using Capcut, a video editing app. These were mainly to make funny videos of my friends, but I found it much faster and easier to use. There’s been a trend going around on social media of collage-type videos which I had been very interested in trying out. I thought of creating a sort of blissful collage of the trip I had to Korea. 

 

I started by looking for the right music to cement the tone I wanted to set. From my last project, I realised deciding early on on the music made making aesthetic decisions much quicker. I got on Tiktok and after a bit of scrolling (and a lot of self-control), I found the perfect audio, which sounded like a vintage movie soundtrack. This helped me nail down the concept as something more vintage and romantic. 

 

I took the shots I wanted, exported them to Lightroom, and edited them to look like they were taken with a film camera. I took my time fine-tuning the editing for the first picture, then created a preset and applied it to similar ones shot in sunlight. With slight editing for each, I managed to achieve a consistent colour tone for each photo in under half an hour. 

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Next came the time-consuming part. I needed to cut out a section of each photo so I could create an overlay effect. I tried to use an online background remover to save time, but it wouldn’t recognise the subject in the photo, so I had to download a background remover app to erase each one manually. Luckily I had a stylus which made the process much easier. Once I completed this, I got on Capcut and started editing. 

 

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I imported in all the pictures I wanted into the video, then arranged them in the order I wanted. I had some issues figuring out how to add the overlays as it had no layer option. I searched up tutorials on Tiktok and quickly figured it out, then started editing. The final outcome took a little longer than expected to reach, but I had no issues with crashes this time. 

 

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Overall, I think there are pros and cons to working with a video editing app. For example, all the content I wanted to put in was already on my phone, so I saved alot of time importing images I wanted. The app was also much simpler to use, which made it easier for me to figure out how to edit things. 

 

The downside of the app being so simple is that more complex actions can’t be done. If I wanted to move or adjust the length of each clip, I had to adjust each one manually. I couldn’t just select everything at once and drag it out like I could on my laptop. This made it much more complicated as I had to decide on the timing of each clip early on so I could work more efficiently. I also had to manually adjust the overlay to match each section of the video, which was hard as the app also didn’t have guidelines and I had to use my fingers to resize things, which was much more work. 

 

I like the final outcome, but I couldn’t figure out how to edit the video on the app exactly as I did on Lightroom, so I didn’t end up adding any videos in. I kept wanting to stick to the original idea I had, which was overlaying the images over videos instead of photos, but it was taking too much time to figure out. I figured I should focus on finishing the video over stressing on the things I couldn’t do. I worked around this by finding similar images to the videos and taking screenshots to make still images. 

 

I did take much less time to edit this time, but because I’m so used to working with Adobe, I realise I’m really not used to doing things differently. While I have to explore more apps to see what I can work with in the future, I do see myself utilizing these apps to optimize my workflow. For example, I could try putting the video together beforehand on my phone and then importing it to my laptop to edit the colours there. This project made me realise there are more viable options to video content creation that I can utilise.