I’ve finally dipped my toe into TikTok by creating a lasercutting video, and I must say….

I hate it!

As soon as you open TikTok it just shoves moving images right in your face. You can’t escape them. It’s a horrible experience.

It’s such a shame that the app rudely tries to force all of those moving images into my eyes, because actually I would love to watch videos on things like lasercutting techniques, or tutorials on making polymer clay items. I don’t think the problem is that I’m old – I honestly believe I’ve always found that sort of thing annoying. (Also unwanted noises.) (Also unwanted smells.)

OK, I am old. But in my defence I’ve always felt that was born middle-aged, so I would never have liked TikTok’s endless video looping.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here is the first-ever video that I’ve put on TikTok:

@kay_vincent

LaserSister – my laser cutter making an M Christmas decoration. #LaserCut #LaserCutter

♬ original sound – K

How I did it

Mainly for my own future reference before I forget the giant hassle of how I did it, here are the steps I took in creating this short video clip:

  1. Took a video on my (Samsung) phone, showing the lasercutter doing its thing.
  2. Saved the video onto my Google Drive, so I’d be able to access it from other devices.
  3. Opened iMovie on my macbook laptop thing, and imported the video.
  4. Speeded up the video in iMovie so that it played at about 8x speed.
  5. Dragged and dropped a still image of the ‘M’ decoration to the beginning of the movie, to introduce what the heck the video was about.
  6. Dragged and dropped another still image of the ‘M’ decoration to the end of the movie, to show the finished article.
  7. Prodded buttons in iMovie until I accidentally caused it to create a transition from the still ‘M’ image into the video clip, and then from the video clip into the other still ‘M’ image. (iMovie was really bossy and decided to automatically turn the still image into a moving one, but I quite liked that effect so I didn’t try to fight it.)
  8. Fought with iMovie until I somehow cropped the second still image so it didn’t show the metal ruler that had been in the original image.
  9. Somehow added a caption to the top left of the whole video, couldn’t find out how to get rid of it, then gave up trying.
  10. Went into File > Share > File and saved the new video project.
  11. Opened TikTok in my browser on the laptop. Ugh.
  12. Clicked on ‘Upload’. (At least that bit was easy.)
  13. Tweaked the caption and added a couple of hashtags.

There – I think that’s all I did to put my lasercutting video onto TikTok. Now I’m off to experiment with shoving it on Pinterest and Twitter.

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