The video you can change, and the video you can only make again

You cannot design and you cannot edit video, and you do not know where to begin. Running a small business, that is usually where it stops. So the work goes to somebody who can do it. What comes back is usually one finished file. There is one thing nobody mentions at that moment, which is what happens later, when you need it in a shape that is only slightly different.

We learned this from our own samples. The KAZENA Motion page carries 11 samples of 15 seconds each. Ten of them are not video files; they are drawn from the code of the page, inside the browser of the person looking. Only the remaining one is real footage: the announcement film for our own original anime, NINJA-極-, edited down to 15 seconds. On the page, its genre reads original anime and announcement film.

The first thing that gave us trouble, once they stood side by side, was the clock. The samples play one after another, so the whole row holds a single clock. The ones drawn with code are functions that take a moment in time and return the picture at that moment, so handing them the clock is enough. Real footage, though, has a clock of its own. Once it starts playing it advances without reference to ours.

So we made the footage obey our clock. It plays only while the clock advances, and when the clock stops the footage stops: when someone stops it by hand, when it leaves the screen, when the tab is left. Only when the two clocks drift apart by more than 0.6 seconds do we move the footage to where the clock is. Small differences we leave alone. Correcting every one of them makes the picture shiver, which looks worse than the drift did.

We delayed the loading too. This footage is not loaded until it is needed. Until then, a single frame from inside it, the one at 14.7 seconds where the title appears, stands in as a still picture. The sound is stripped out as well: the showreel is built to stay silent unless the viewer asks for music, so one piece playing audio of its own would be a problem.

All of that is still detail only we have to care about. What mattered to the person commissioning a video was the next part. Places people watch on a phone need portrait, 9:16, so for the ones drawn with code we rebuilt the arrangement for a tall frame. Real footage, though, has no arrangement. It only has a picture. The first portrait file we made was the middle of the landscape one, cut out. About a third of the width was visible, a figure was cut in half, and the title ran outside the frame. I opened it myself and thought it was far too big.

The fix was not to change an arrangement. The file had to be made again. We rebuilt it from the landscape original, shrinking the scene so that about 78% of the width is visible and placing it in the middle of the frame. The space above and below holds the same footage, blurred and darkened. As a picture it sits better than a black band. The still frame was photographed again from the same moment.

We could only do that because the landscape original was still with us. If all we had held was the delivered portrait file, there would have been nowhere to go back to. A finished video can be shortened and it can be made smaller, but it cannot be rearranged. What is inside the picture has already been decided.

That is the difference between the 10 and the one, and it is also why we draw our videos with code. When a piece is drawn with code, changing one line of text, adding an arrangement for a narrow frame, or changing a price on screen next year does not have to start with making it again. So our current plans hand over, together with a video file for each shape, the original files of the video: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a short guide. For simple changes, a price or one line of text, that is enough. A larger change, a different structure for instance, can still need a new production.

Honestly, this does not make everything changeable. One of our samples is real footage, and real footage turned out to be the kind of thing that even we could only make again. So for work that needs the filmed or drawn footage itself, the thing to protect is not the finished file but the material it came from.

That is why what we hand over also includes a list of the fonts and audio used, with licences and sources, and a short note on the checks we ran and the limits we know about. All of it exists so that somebody else opening those files in six months is not stuck. Commissioning a video is not only receiving a good-looking 15 seconds; it is receiving a state of affairs in which you can keep changing it a little at a time for years.

If there is one thing worth doing today, it is checking whether you still hold the source material for the things other people have made for you, a logo, a product photograph, a video. If you do not, ask whoever made it; usually it is still there. KAZENA Motion is not taking orders yet. If you would like to be told when it opens, you can ask from the page.