The 2k trick - good looking video on every social platform

If you, like me, want your video work to look good on every platform then you’re going to want to optimise your work. Nobody wants to see a horizontal video at a tiny size in their instagram stories, so we’re just not going to subject people to that.

This trick was taught to me by the lovely Jon from Jist, and I’ve shared it with everyone who’s ever spoken to me about filming something since.

Basically, to have your footage look good everywhere at 1080p, you want to film in 2 or 4k. You don’t need an expensive camera to do this either - check your phones video settings, a lot of phones can film in very high quality these days. This might seem ridiculous and resplendent, but there’s a good reason for it.

My demo piece for today is going to be this lovely piece of footage of my friend, regular model and muse; G. You’ll be seeing a lot of her in this post.

When you’ve got your footage, open Adobe Premiere Pro. Go to File> New > Project and select the option that matches your footage’s frame rate. In my case I filmed on a DSLR at at 30 frames per second, so I’ll choose DSLR1080p30f. Then you want to make 3 sequences.

Go to File > New > Sequence. The sizes you’ll want to create are:

• 1920 x 1080

• 1080 x 1080

• 1080 x 1920

If you accidentally forget to set your sequence size when you make the new sequence, you can change it any time by going to Sequence > Sequence settings. Import your footage , and drop it into whichever sequence you think will be your “main” sequence. For example, if you’re editing a video for YouTube but you want to show clips on instagram and insta stories then edit your footage in your 1920x1080 sequence. Today I’m just showing off a nice piece of footage I took, so I’m calling my “main” sequence my 1920x1080 shot for the sake of this blog post.

When you drop your imported footage into the editing timeline, you’ll get a warning. Like a fighter pilot in a very high budget action movie, you’ll want to ignore this warning.

Select keep existing settings. You can also turn this warning off, but I keep it on just in case.

Drop your footage in and you’ll see that it’s way bigger than the final size of your video. Size it down to however big you’d like it to be.

This trick is an exporting trick, but it also works to help with your editing. You can resize your footage to create zoomed in/further away shots that will make your piece a bit more visually interesting if you’re not able to use a 2-camera set up for your shoot.

Export it and you’ve got your first view. Easy. Now, copy and paste your footage over to your square sequence.

I didn’t like the way she looked when I imported her, so I re-sized the footage again and brought her face into the middle. Much better.

Do the same again for your vertical sequence. The great thing about having such large footage is that you’ll be able to scale it up and down to suit your various 1080p formats without losing the quality of the footage. If you had filmed in 1080, you’d have to stretch it to fit a vertical sequence and it would look gross and fuzzy.

When you’re done, export all your footage. I do not recommend adding subtitles - if you’re dealing with speech - inside Premiere Pro. It’s an absolute pain and will only end in tears. Download Submerge and apply your subtitles to your finished export. When exporting for YouTube, a normal export is just fine. But, when you’re exporting in GIF format so that you can add clips to your website and impress your friends, you’ll need to make a lot of changes to your export settings. You can throw your footage into Media Encoder and test out what works best, but I find tiny size (about 300px?), small frame rate and sacrificing a little bit of quality gets you a GIF that won’t destroy your page loading times.

Make your social posts more exciting with interactivity

For this years Tech Nation Report I wanted to make the idea of twinning cities more exciting than just…showing the twinned cities. So, I came up with the idea of creating a bit of an interactive puzzle where users could look around the map themselves and find the twins.

I found this blog post by Studio behind 90, which provided a simple guide to making a 360 scrollable image. However, it’s actually even simpler to do than what they describe.

The first step is the same - you have to download an equirectangular map. You can draw whatever you like across the middle second of the map in photoshop or illustrator, I used illustrator in this instance.

The red lines are taken from the original map, and here they show the main area people will see at eye level. When it’s finished it’ll fold up into a sphere rather than a square. Everything outside the red lines will be stretched and folded, and the centre will bulge out so I needed to squash it down and squish it in so that it would look proportional in its final form. The central big bubble is what will show when you first bring it in, so frame it up nicely.

When you’ve got your content looking right you then need to throw it into photoshop. On the top menu go to 3D > Spherical panorama > new panorama layer from selected layer(s). After you’ll move into the 3D space and be able to scroll around your sphere to see how it’s worked. You can have a look around for any mistakes, and undo your changes if you need to correct anything. You can also add other layers on top, draw on them and then merge them into the sphere, just merge your layers to add new details. I prefer to go back and forth.

As it says in the original tutorial, you’ll need to add some xmp data which they provide as a download and then it’s a simple export as a jpg and you’ve got your scrollable image.

This method of 3D only really works on Facebook, so another thing you can do is create scrollable images for instagram. You need to make sure your image can be split into squares, then send it to your phone. You can either use an app like the ones recommended in this article, or you can split it into squares yourself and use instagrams multiple image posting feature.

A sparkly seahorse for Bloom and Wild

This year Bloom and Wild ran a design competition, to give different artists a chance to design their summer packaging.

They did not ask for fully completed entries, just sketches and moodboards to indicate what kind of design you would look to produce. The winner would then get the chance to produce their design for Bloom and Wild and choose all the trimmings such as the ribbon around the box and the card inside.

From my initial brain storm I knew I wanted to use the Pantone colour of the year, living coral as the inspiration for the piece because I was very interested in the environmental message of this years colour choice. However, rather than using the colour coral, I chose to use the visual of coral and underwater plants since to me that represents the summer season. Some of the plants selected for the summer bouquets also looked like they would sit well in a magical underwater garden.

Japanese fashion inspires me a lot, and since I was already thinking about magic and joy and sparkles - I turned the queens of kawaii frippery, Angelic Pretty. I looked at a lot of their prints in a very in depth manner and assessed how they used colour and achieved their unique visual style.

I created the initial sketch using pencil and paper, and then created the seahorse using Adobe Photoshop. Rather than blending the colours, I used a cell-shading like process to imitate the Angelic Pretty look, while still adding lots of textures to give the seahorse depth and personality. If you look close up, you can see how I’ve used lines and dots to create depth of shading while keeping a small palette.

Lately I’ve been very interested in different techniques that make printing more eco-friendly and sustainable - and I considered this as part of the environmental message of the overall piece. The flower boxes would almost definitely get thrown away, so I wanted to use printing techniques on recyclable, uncoated card and eco-glitter.

The making of Follow for more Soft Islam

I’ve wanted to document my friend Shasha’s style for a long time. So I set about making something that would celebrate her unique vision of the world.

I began with the sketch below that summarised my vision and ended with three short fashion films, which I released on international women’s day.

Shasha is a modern muslim woman, who expresses herself through her pastel fashion style. We wanted to create a set of films together that would celebrate her, as a brown-skinned woman in alternative fashion.

At the time, we were really inspired by the work of Shirin Neshat, as her work also explores the relationship between women and the religious and cultural values of Islam.

Shasha initially began wearing pastel fashion to break out of what is expected of a muslim person, and a darker skinned person.

At the time, tumblr was a very popular platform and there were particular trends for things called “pale blogs” and “rosy blogs.” These were aesthetically lead blogs which collated images - kind of like a mood board, and each one would put a phrase like “follow for more rosy posts” under every image. What we noticed about these blogs that darker skinned people would not feature, unless they were heavily filtered to lighten their skin.

Even in the modern case of instagram, pastel fashion is often still attributed to look “best” with white skin.

We wanted to cast aside all of these preconceived imaged and create something that celebrated an image of a dark skinned, Indian muslim in an alternative fashion. We wanted the theme of the film to be joy, and thriving rather than just surviving.

I painted a series of traditional Islamic art patterns in pastel colours and glitters, rather than their traditional rich colours and gold detailing. Shasha collected her favourite pastel items, as well as some traditional Indian pieces to create three looks. The looks went from very pink, very pastel looks with a wig to slowly becoming a bit more wearable and revealing more of Shasha’s features, such as her black hair. We wanted the looks to tell a story where it was about her finding her own rhythm and place in the world through her unique style.

For the both of us it was important to show the mix of cultural themes with a modern fashion, and the beauty of a darker skin tone. I made Shasha smile and laugh a lot during the filming because again, the underlying theme was joy! We wanted to celebrate.

Since the conversation we wanted to have with these videos was partly about social media, and a response to “pale blogs” I chose to present the films as square - since square videos are the most popular on social platforms.

The videos are also set to Indian drumming loops that have a pop feel to them, as another way to mix up all of the different cultural elements.

A Fortune Teller for Tech Crunch

Why just give people leaflets when you could do something more fun? Tech North was bringing 10 innovative Northern companies to Tech Crunch Berlin, as well as having their own stand. They wanted something that people attending the conference pack easily in their luggage to take to the event, but that would be fun and start conversations when they got there.

Since I’m totally obsessed with Japan, and fun, I realised that making paper fun is as simple as folding it. Creating origami fortune tellers would engage people at the stand, start conversations and still be light enough to carry in hand luggage.

Having a fortune teller allowed people working at the stand to start conversations easily and on a positive note - asking people at the conference if they’d like to play a game rather than immediately bombing them with a sales pitch.

Through playing the game, attendees would learn the name of the organisation, the name of a town in the North of England and in-depth fact about the tech eco-system.

If you want to make one, the design is very simple. Split a square piece of paper into 4x4 grid. You can use illustrators normal shape distribution options to make your lines evenly spread.

To get the fortune teller design, you also need to join your outer corners with diagonal lines to make a big X. Then join the middle of each side together to make a diamond in the middle.

Put all of your guides on one layer and lock it so you can follow them without disturbing them.

Your four outer squares will be visible on the outside, the blue triangles here are the first unfold and middle diamond is the final “fortune.” When adding text to the middle, make sure that anything you want to sit together sits in one diamond. You can see how the text needs to sit in the final design. If you align the text incorrectly, you won’t be able to read your full fact.

We produced these in a light, glossy card stock for the final design, and the printing company was able to score the paper for us so that people could fold them quickly, easily and precisely at the event stand.

Why is this dress so expensive? A kawaii data story

かわいいデ-タの物語

Kawaii Data no Monogatari

Originally posted August 7th, 2017

July 2019 Update: Some of the information in this post is now out of date because as of last year, this dress received a re-release. Some of you newer readers may well have this very infamous dress in your hands right now. I’m not saying that it was because of this article, but regardless, you’re welcome! At some point in the future I intend to update this article to show the inevitable price crash that comes with flooding the market - very exciting times!

How much is Cats Tea Party worth? Why is it so expensive? This question has plagued people in kawaii fashion circles for many years. By which I mean, since approximately 2014. So three years.

It’s bothered me for a while too, so I decided to finally, definitively find out using the only tools I had available to me; crowdsourced data, some spreadsheets and a recently acquired knack for data visualisation.

The result is this.

Sales values of Angelic Pretty Cats Tea Party since 2012 (separated by colour)

NB: Prices are calculated in GBP because I am English and that’s the money I use.

At this point we have to do a bit of dull conversation about the methodology of this data and how we got here.

Basically, our definition of “unsold” doesn’t actually mean that dress wasn’t worth the listed sale price. Sometimes we would find what we thought was a sale, only to look into the user feedback and find it was actually a scam or someone had backed out. So for example, the buyer on the graph WOULD have paid £2,800 for the dress – but unfortunately the seller backed out. We decided to keep these unsold values in the chart and include them in our work because they do tell us something about how much people think the dress is worth.

Why is Cats Tea Party so damn expensive then?

One part of the reason that Cats Tea Party is so expensive, is that it’s incredibly rare. But just how rare is it? This anecdote gives us a bit of an idea.

“A small art gallery called Parabolica Bis in eastern Tokyo had an Imai Kira exhibit. There was special merch on sale, including tshirts with the snooty cats on them that anyone could buy. During the exhibition, there was an AP tea party at that small gallery with a limit of about 20 people, and a sample CTP was on display. People who attended and reserved the dress got an Imai Kira print as a bonus.

The reservation period wasn’t very long, so I think it’s likely that less than 50 exist.”

– Abiba and Alice on Facebook, who were living in Tokyo at the time.

You can see the original new post discussing the gallery opening here.

“Myself and another Australian girl ordered through chibi-tenshi when they put up the online MTO. Originally chibi-tenshi intended to go to the tea party, but there was a colossal screw up with the tickets to the tea party. The exhibit itself was open for longer, but only a selection of items (these ones! http://www.angelicpretty.com/news/godoten/goods.htm) were available, you couldn’t order the dress there. We had to wait a bit for confirmation, but at some stage (I think after the tea party) AP agreed to do an open MTO online and in store. My emails indicate it went up online for reservation on the 25th of August and this is the first post about it on the Tokyo store blog for reservation (http://yaplog.jp/ap-tokyo/archive/6906).

I’m having difficulty locating any further information about the online reservation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t much since I think it actually wasn’t very popular with many people (I think you either loved it or didn’t care about it) and the initial price likely further put off a number of people who did really like it at the time.”

– Lindzi on Facebook, who ordered the dress online

Another reason that the dress may be so expensive is that it is one of the few modern pieces manufactured in Japan. We know that by 2010 Angelic Pretty were already manufacturing in China, so being made in Japan gives this piece that extra wow factor. Kira had been creating postcard art of AP prints for some time, and they had collaborated previously on ‘Candy-chan on a walk,’ which was a screen printed design. It’s possible that a move to digital printing made it possible for the two to collaborate again.

Also, it’s cats having tea. It’s just inherently want-able.

As part of the Dream Masquerade Carnival event that took place in London in 2017, there was also a Q+A with Maki and Asuka , the Angelic Pretty designers (above). Dear reader, I asked them how many were originally made. I did it for you. I did it for the integrity of the data. But, they didn’t know.

So we know basically why it’s expensive, but exactly how expensive is it?

Pink Prices

Average price for pink cats tea party, including no sales: £1,146.35

Average price for pink cats tea party, excluding no sales: £1,234.26

Our overall valuation of pink cats tea party: £1,190.30

Grey Prices

Average price for grey cats tea party, including no sales: £1,257.58

Average price for grey cats tea party, excluding no sales: £742.10

Our overall valuation of grey cats tea party: £999.84

We did not expect the grey to go for less than the pink. In our opinion it’s worth more, because we think there are less of them (though we have no idea) about but this is what the numbers say. If we remove the most recent value, the average price goes up to £1,114.33 which is possibly more accurate.

The most recent piece of data for grey cats tea party, which is dragging the price down, was actually a sale at Closet Child Ikebukuro. A source from Japan told us that CC is run by people who don’t share the same obsessive knowledge of lolita that would say…cause someone to write a blog post about average sales prices of a dress… and instead they keep more up to date with popular current releases. Knowing that, it’s easy to see how they would end up low balling the price!

Fun Trivia We Learned on the way

I called this post kawaii data no monogatari because we learned a lot of fun but ultimately useless knowledge along the way that we thought would be great to share!

• Did you know that nobody in the dataset had ever split a Cats Tea Party set? Nobody has ever lost a bow, or a choker or had bits fall off any part of the garment. The worst thing that’s happened to any dress being re-sold is some light stains.

• Outside of Japan, the biggest fans of cats tea party are in the US! We think there is at least nine owners of the dress in the US.

• We’ve found out that there is only one known cats tea party set in the UK! Someone has also owned the cutsew.

• The most well travelled dress went from Japan, to Australia, to the USA. It’s travelled roughly 19,929 kilometres across the world. That’s the size of 1,246 of the front of the Palace at Versailles (108m).

• The second most well travelled dress went from Japan, to Finland, to the US.

• The biggest fan of the dress is Lacemarket user Hervia, who has owned and sold the dress twice. Hervia is US based, and sold the dress to sailorenceladus in California, who then sold it on to another Californian. Road trip!

• The most sales of Cats Tea Party happened on Lacemarket – surprise, surprise.

Conclusion

So now we know, sort of conclusively, that the current price of cats tea party is around £1,000. We also know why it’s so expensive.

If you know of a sale of cats tea party that you can prove, please comment down below and we will come back every couple of months or so and update all the numbers. If there is truly 50 dresses in existence, wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to find all of them?

We really hope you enjoyed reading this nonsense, please feel free to suggest any other elements of lolita fashion that you’d like us to do a data piece about in the comments too. Or, if you want to know more about this dress, please leave a comment below!

Finally, if you would like to see the original data, please click here.

Other Boring Points about Methodology

To get our final values for the dress, we used two websites. The first one converted the currency on the date of sale and the second adjusted that value for inflation to the current year. We did this because we felt it was the only way to make a fair comparison.

Secondly, our data is by no means conclusive. Though we looked for listings on livejournal, lacemarket, mercari, yahoo auctions and mbok many of these sites don’t allow you to see unsold items or previous sales unless you have a direct link to the original auction. We also attempted to find sales on the Chinese resale market, but were not able to.

Shout Outs and Thank You-s

This post wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of teamwork. Firstly I’d like to thank all who have contributed to the data collection so far. Though we wish we had more data it was amazing that we were able to collect any data about such a tiny niche thing in the first place. Next, a big shout out to Jo for her help and for suffering my endless ramblings about this project. Then I’d like to thank Kyra for trawling Japanese auction sites and finding some really interesting tidbits of info. Also Abiba for providing her quote about the initial production.

A BIG shout out to the team at egl.circlly.com for their cracking website. Not only did they have the best interface and richest data, but the ability to filter all previous sales of the dress was a god send during this project.