Creating the TikTok trending video “If I was a”

Yes, I fell in love with this trend, the “If I was a” video trend that I am seeing all over Instagram at the moment. It does take quite some time to make, as there are a lot of photos involved, but once you get the hang of it you do move through it quite quickly. I used a combination of iPhone screen capture, CapCut and Canva. So you can make this video using free apps and tools. I have made assumptions in this tutorial that you have some knowledge of making videos… if you do not know how to add text to a video you might need to quickly Google some bits!

Capturing the sound

The sound used for the video is a snippet of the song Run boy run by Woodkid. You can watch the full video and listen to the whole song on YouTube! I really like it. The easiest way for iPhone users to grab the sound is to use Screen Recording.

• Find the video on Instagram and TikTok with the correct snippet used
• Swipe down from the top right corner of the screen
• Tap the button that has a white dot with a larger circle around it
• It counts down 3, 2, 1 and then changes to a red dot (like below)
• Go to Instagram or TikTok and watch the video with the snippet of music (about 40 seconds)
• Click on the red dot to stop recording after you have watched the entire 40 seconds
• The video will save to your photos

You will then need to add this video to CapCut later to extract the audio and delete the video. Clever huh?

Creating the images in Canva

I love Canva and I thought this was the easiest way to collect the images I wanted for each section. The template I used has the following categories:

• Colour
• Holiday
• Place
• Food
• Animal
• Drink
• Season
• Flower
• City
• Hobby

So for each of these categories (or choose your own categories) you need to have 17 photos and 1 block colour image. So 18 images per 10 categories, yes you will need to make 180 images altogether! AHHHH. That’s not including the 3 second intro image of yourself too.

In Canva choose the “Instagram Story” template and then a blank template. Great tip = I used pages to make my images as it downloads them all at once to your photos…. a lot quicker. So the first page was the colour block, then all subsequent pages had an image on it on my chosen theme for the category. The below photo is my collection for Paris in the City category. You can do this in the Canva app on iPhone or on the web/desktop.

Creating the video in CapCut

I used the CapCut app on my iPhone to edit the video together. I made the most out of the zoom on the timeline so I could zoom in to get the accurate timings for each photo.

First you need to add the music, you will need this along the way to check your images are cut right. So, add the video you made in step 1 (the screen recording). Once you have added the video you can tap on it to extract the audio. CapCut then cleverly adds the audio to a separate timeline to the video. You will delete the screen recording video in a moment.

Next you need to add the 3 second image or video of yourself, where you will add the text “If I was a” to start the video off. Tap to the start of the timeline, the white line shows you where you have selected – add the video. Now you can delete the screen recording video from above!

From here you need to add text on top of the video, I split it into 4 so each word showed up at different times. You can add just 1 block of text. Make sure this text is within the 3 seconds. It must overlap where you have the intro video otherwise it just doesn’t work.

Now we get onto the categories… the fiddly bit!

Template for the video

Each category contains 17 photos and 1 colour block image. The 17 photos have the category word covering them and the colour block image has the ANSWER split into 2 parts. So if the word is HALLOWEEN, you need to make HALLO and then WEEN to go with the music! The pattern is as follows:

• Photo 1 to 10 = 0.1 seconds
• Photo 11 = 0.5 seconds
• Photo 12 to 17 = 0.1 seconds
• Colour block = 0.9 seconds

You can then easily match the text overlays on top of the photos and colour block. I centered the category text over all the photos and then did the colour block text to the left alignment.

Keep going until you have done all the categories and the music should come to a stop. The entire video will be around 40 seconds (or 39 seconds in my case) long and then you have your “If I was a” video that is trending at the moment!

I would love to know if you used this tutorial!

Check out my other photography and videography tips and tricks. If you have any pointers I would love to know about them in the comments below.

I do have Canva Pro, which enables me to use more photos than the basic account. I pay for this myself though as I use Canva all the time!