Every October I put the same post on the hall’s Facebook page. Last year’s table, the Victoria sponge in the middle, the date and time typed underneath. It does its job.
This year my grandson looked at it over my shoulder and said, kindly, that it looked like a notice pinned to a board. Everything else in his feed moved. Ours sat there.
He is right, which is irritating. So I gave myself a Tuesday evening to find a short moving picture for the top of the post: leaves falling past the hall window with the lights on inside. I had a cup of tea, the laptop, and no intention of learning video editing at my age.
Three names I knew, three locked doors
Canva first, because the treasurer makes our posters there. Its video page has a big purple button for making a clip. I pressed it and got a box inviting me to log in or sign up: Google, Facebook or an email. I have a Canva login somewhere in the notebook, but the point was to see what a person can do without digging out a password.
One press of Canva’s purple button and this is what you get.
Clipchamp came with the laptop. The app opens on a screen that wants you to sign in or make an account, with a Microsoft button on top.
Adobe Express wanted me to sign in too, by email or through Google, Apple or Facebook.
I wanted to type a sentence and see a picture, and all three wanted to know who I was first.
The stock footage detour
Then Pexels, a library of free clips other people have filmed. I typed autumn leaves and got pages of them: leaves on a table, yellow trees, a slow drift of red maple. You click one, press the green download button, and it is on your computer. No account.
Pexels hands over the clip without asking who you are; sponsored clips in the results are the price.
Honestly, if all you want is leaves, stop here. The trouble was that none of them were our hall, and people in the village know our window.
Where I ended up
A newsletter I get mentioned Rewind as a place where you describe a video and it makes one. The page lets you look before it asks anything: a big box for typing what you want to see, and a menu for the clip’s shape, where I picked square to fill a phone screen.
My sentence in the box, the shape set to square. Nothing else to fill in.
What I typed, as I would say it to the chap who paints the hall: autumn leaves drifting down past the window of a small community hall, warm light glowing inside, slow camera pan.
Generate pressed, a box popped up wanting an email and nothing more: no password to make up, no card. A little later a green tick said it had finished, with the clip and a download button under it.
The finished clip with its download button underneath.
The clip is a brick wall, a window with a dark painted frame, and through the glass an orange tree lit as if the sun is coming through it. A handful of yellow leaves hang at the glass and drift as it plays. Three seconds, which turns out to be exactly enough. It does not look like our hall, which has pebbledash, but it looks like a hall, and it looks like October.
The steps, for whoever runs the page after me
- Open the video page and type one sentence describing the picture you want: what is in it, what the light is doing, one thing that moves.
- Set the shape to square.
- Press Generate, then type in your email. You get a clip of up to three seconds.
- Watch it. Not right? Change the sentence a little and try again.
- Press the download button; the file lands in your downloads folder.
- On the hall’s page, start a new post, press Photo/video and choose that file.
- Put the date, the time and what to bring in the words of the post.
- Post it, then open the page on your phone to check that it plays.
What each one wanted from me
- Canva: a login before the first clip. Fine if you already live there for the posters.
- Clipchamp: a Microsoft, Google or email sign-in before you see the editor.
- Adobe Express: a sign-in before the app. Another password for the notebook.
- Pexels: nothing. Real footage, free to download, somebody else’s leaves.
- Rewind: an email, once. A square clip of the picture I described, and a button to download it.
Things I would tell the next person
Describe, do not direct. Write the sentence the way you would describe a painting to someone who has not seen it. Leave the event out of it; the tool does not know what a bake sale is, it knows leaves, windows and light.
No writing in the picture. People cannot read lettering while they scroll, and the date belongs in the post where it can be copied.
Square, not wide. A wide clip sits as a thin strip across the middle of a phone screen; a square one takes up most of it, and on our page that is the difference between a glance and a stop.
Do not fret about sound. Facebook plays videos silently as people scroll past, so the picture has to do the work on its own, and leaves falling past a lit window manage that without any help.
Keep the real photos for the real cakes. The clip stops the thumb; the photo of Margaret’s lemon drizzle gets people through the door.
Margaret has already put in her request for the Christmas fair: the same window, snow instead of leaves, a tree with fairy lights inside. I have written the sentence on the back of a raffle ticket and tucked it in the notebook, next to the passwords I was so keen not to add to.
The post went up on Wednesday morning. By lunchtime the vicar’s wife had asked which window it was, and my grandson had sent a thumbs up, which from him is a standing ovation.
