My kids wanted to see the balloons their mother painted on their wall come alive. The eldest told me the story of the mad balloon and I recorded it on my phone.
Out of that came a twenty-second tale. Twenty seconds is two ten-second pieces, and joining two pieces I can do.
Both came out well. On its own, each one was about the best I have got so far.
And when I put them together, the story starts twice.
What I did wrong without knowing
I gave both pieces the same opening photo and the whole story.
So both of them begin at the beginning, because both of them know the beginning. In the first one the balloon flies alone and after three seconds the girl balloon comes in, and in the second the exact same thing happens: same shot, same entrance, same three seconds.
I checked it frame by frame in case it was just me. It is the same scene.
The fix that did not exist
I asked for one piece to overlap the other and hide the repeat, and there was no way. It was not the tool being lazy: there was no room.
The voice runs end to end. In the first piece the narration goes from second two to nearly ten, and in the second, from two to eight.
Crossing the sound at the join eats words. Any overlap takes half a sentence with it, and no amount of craft gets round that.
I ended up opening the editor by hand. It is still unfinished.
What does fix it
The picture and the voice do not have to start at the same place.
I threw away the three repeated seconds of picture in the second piece and kept the whole voice: the picture comes in at second three, the voice a second earlier.
You cannot tell. It is a narrator talking over the top and there is no mouth to match.
Sixteen and a half seconds, the whole story, no repeat and no hand editing.
What changes from today
When I ask for the next piece, the opening photo is no longer the one from the start: it is the last frame of the piece before. And the text only carries what happens from there on, because whatever you mention ends up on screen.
The other half is not the machine, it is the writing. A twenty-second tale is not written to fill twenty seconds: every piece has to start and end with half a second of silence.
That half second is the only thing that lets you join two pieces without cutting a word.