TikTok videos are something I never thought I would be talking about in a school blog post, but here we go. Our first maker project just wrapped up and was all about how to make personal design choices. To do so, we all had to make five different short videos following different popular trends.
To start we first had to make sure everything was organized a prepared for our videos.
We did this in two ways. The first way was organizing the entire project (and life) in a task manager, in our case the app Things. We also used the default apple calendar time block out when we were going to do each task. Overall this was an upgrade to what I was doing before, but there were still many parts that I would like to change and improve if I were to do it again.
My biggest problem was the sheer quantity of To-Do’s I had added. I typically work best when my home ‘Today’ section is very concise with only what I need to do that specific day. If my ‘Today’ section fills up with too many to-do’s at one time, I can get easily overwhelmed by my tasks. Moving forward I need to focus on better scheduling each task to make the process more streamlined, but overall it was a good start to life organization.
The next phase of the project was researching what trends we would follow for our videos. This part of the project was particularly hard since I have never used TikTok or followed any trends what-so-ever
Overall there were quite a lot of trends and I didn’t know what to do with most of them. However I did have a few ideas, and eventually managed to narrow down my research into five videos I thought I could make. So let’s see how I did…
The dumb ways to die trend comes from the idea of a freeze frame the moment somebody does something dumb. I figured that falling from a height would be a really good fit, which would also be quite achievable since I climb quite often. For the video, I didn’t intentionally fall as I wanted it to look as realistic as possible. Instead, I recorded myself climbing many hard routes, and inevitably I would take some type of tumble. This strategy ended up working quite well as the fall happened unexpectedly, further aligning with the trend.
While planning and prototyping for the video I also added an extra part at the end in which the video would un-freeze with a thumping noise. Although this does deviate from the original trend a bit, I thought it added a bit more humor which is why it ended up making the final cut.
For this video we tried our take on “It’s Corn”. A trend that uses a musical version of a kid talking about his love for corn. For this video, we decided to put our personal spin on it and decided to play the song on our band instruments.
The hardest part of making this video was coordinating each part with each other. As we played each part separately we needed some way to keep time as a group. We ended up playing each part while listening to each other’s recordings. This lets us combine each recording in post to perfectly line up with each other, and create the final video.
The other difficulty with this video I found was in the prototype. While making the prototype video, I needed to have three different videos stacked on top of each other. This ended up being a huge challenge to do in iMovie, the software I was using at the time. Due to these challenges, I decided to use CapCut, a software that allows users to edit separate videos to make the final video. While this wasn’t strictly necessary, it did make editing the final video much easier and taught me a new video editing software that I’ll be using more in the future.
Food is a big part of TikTok. Lots of people also like how to rate some of the food they were eating. With all this, myself as well as my friends Fraser and Ariane decided to rate some of the items at our school cafeteria. (This was also the first time that I had eaten at the cafeteria so it was an interesting experience). Overall, the creation of this video was pretty simple. We scheduled a time with everybody, bought four different foods to try, recorded some b-roll, and rated each food out of ten. Overall the final video is pretty entertaining, and I got tasty food, a win-win in my books.
The TikTok trend “Can we skip to the good part” typically contains a person arriving at a new destination, showcasing their newfound beauty. For the people who weren’t going to Disney world (i.e. me), this trend was a bit harder. We were, however, going to Capilano Suspension Bridge, a world-class attraction located right in our backyard. With a few tweaks of the wording, and some sad acting at school, I was able to make a pretty good rendition of this trend, without leaving the city.
The not everything can be an album cover trend is pretty self-explanatory. The challenge with this one was finding the time to take the videos. As most of the videos were taken while at Capilano Suspension Bridge (in which we were already busy), it was difficult to take the time to record the parts of the TikTok. I ended up filming several different shots, some at school and some on the field study then narrowed it down to five for the final video. This let me cut some of the ideas that didn’t work so well. Pretty much all of the videos were staged and purposely recorded to some extent, however I did keep the camera rolling just in case something interesting happened.
In the end I found this project really difficult, and to be honest I didn’t really enjoy it that much. This is largely due to how unfamiliar I was with the world of short-term content and trends. Making these videos was also significantly harder as our entire class left us to go to Disney World. This meant for the entire filming duration of this project, we were left to our own devices. Without any external pressure, it was up to us to manage how we were going to spend our class time to effectively get all of our filming done. Thankfully this didn’t end in a train wreck, and we were able to somewhat manage two different projects by ourselves. While it wasn’t perfect, I did manage to finish all five videos in a timely manner, and I’m quite proud of how we were able to schedule our time. There is still a lot to improve on when it comes to effectively managing my time and making decisions. Ultimately, through my personal design decisions, each video showcases a little bit of what makes me unique, and that’s something I can be proud of
See you next time,
Nolan📱