My initial idea for the video was to show someone “painting” in the air in front of the Old Well, a famous landmark at Carolina. The first few clips would be shot from a variety closeup angles to keep what was being painted ambiguous. The end of the video would feature wider shots to reveal that the person had painted “congrats!” I had previously watched a tutorial on how to do the writing effect in Adobe After Effects for a simple title graphic, so I figured the process would be fairly similar for a video with actual film footage (rather than just a plain background). My ideas, however, made it a little more complicated, as the angles of the shots had to align with the angles of the text, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about filming.

I first created some vector mockups of the “congrats!” text from a variety of angles on Adobe Illustrator, and these gave me something to reference when I was filming. Some of the shots I had in mind would’ve been too complicated to incorporate, so I decided to stick with a side-angle shot, a shot from the back in which the person would be “behind” the text, and a standard shot from the front.

The filming and editing processes were both fairly simple but took a lot of trial and error. My friends, who volunteered to be in the video, had previously helped me with some of my film projects, so they knew I needed multiple versions of each shot. Despite the tour groups and other passerby that stared as we filmed, the two willingly “painted the air” numerous times so that I could get the footage I needed. I realized later on that I should’ve filmed more versions of the shots so that I could’ve had more flexibility during post-production. Needless to say, the editing process also required a lot of guesstimating. Since the effect I was going to use only works with text made within the application, I had to replicate my vector mockups of the text within After Effects. I then had to figure out how to align the timing of the effect with the timing of the footage; although I wasn’t able to perfectly sync them up, I think I got as close as I could.

The entire project took about three days to complete, and the video ended up being one of the Admissions’ most liked/viewed posts on Instagram! Even though it’s a super simple video, I’m actually really happy with how it turned out, mainly because I sort of figured it out along the way. Now that I know how to do this effect, I will definitely try and save myself some time during post production by being more precise during the filming.