In late 2019, my sister C. and her then boyfriend organized a week-end road trip to Ouidah, Benin. She had taken a few videos and images without knowing what to do with them.
Enter: my boredom/restlessness of not having a project to work on 😔
In early January 2020, she remembered having those rushes and gave them to me, giving me creative carte blanche to create a little edit for her and that's exactly what I did!
Still of the first second of the vlog
I wanted to challenge myself, so I decided to turn what she gave me into a mini vlog of less than a minute!
At first, I didn’t know what I was going to do but then, I thought:
Why not use a song as the driving force/baseline for the vlog? 💡
At the time, I was really obsessed with Come Back to Me by Joan Stvz, an electronic/future bass song.
Cover art of the album in which "Come Back to Me" is present
I took bits of the song and remixed it to get to the length of 43 seconds!💨
Now, for the challenging part: editing the footage/images into a stylish yet cohesive final video. With the snappy, fast-paced music as my baseline, the best bet was for the visuals to match the same criteria.
To achieve that, I edited the videos as a form of slideshow on beat, with some "footage reversal" and repeating frames:
Example of "time reversal"
Example of repeating frames
For the overall look of the vlog, I settled for the vintage/captured-on-an-old-Polaroid "vibe". This includes:
Old film/Polaroidframes:
Frame used for videos
Frame used for photos
Grain and a 2-strip color effect with added contrast:
Snippet highlighting the color tones
a simple font, used throughout the vlog:
Accord Heavy SF, the font in question
What took the most part was, funnily, finding the 1st video/image to put up but after this roadblock was crossed, it got easier! 👍🏾✨