Retro camcorder
A 90s home video. The tape rewinds, then your family clips play with a camcorder display, a typed title and the date in the corner.

What Vidova will do
Make my family clips look like a 90s home video. The tape rewinds, then plays, with the camcorder date and time, VHS lines, tracking glitches, a warm faded look, and the title "SUMMER OF '98". The video is vertical, 9:16, and about 22.6 seconds long. Footage: I attach five daylight clips of people together: a family with a dog, a dandelion, parents with their son, marshmallows at a fire, and a family at sunset. Each clip needs about four seconds of usable footage. The first clip needs an empty top third, such as sky or trees, for the title. The last clip is the sunset, because it can fade out slowly. Mute the clips' own sound and play them all at normal speed. Look: Every shot is warm and faded, with lifted blacks, rolled-off highlights, colors pulled back by about 20 percent, soft VHS edges, a light red and cyan color fringe, film grain, a faint warm wash and fine horizontal scanlines. Add a slow handheld sway and a tiny push-in on every shot. The last shot runs a little warmer, like the sun is going down. Rewind: The tape rewinds first. For 1.6 seconds the last shot, the sunset, runs backwards at about 2.6 times speed. It looks grey and smeared, it tears about four times a second, and the frame rolls up a little. The display blinks "◄◄ REW" and its tape counter spins backwards. A tape rewind whine plays. Display: At 1.6 seconds a button click plays and the display switches to "PLAY ►". The camcorder display is the only graphic in the film. Its letters are blocky pixel letters in cream, with a red ghost and a cyan ghost a few pixels apart, a soft glow and a slight wobble like a worn tape. Corner brackets spring in at the edges. A battery icon sits at the top right, with "SP" and the tape counter under it, starting at 1:02:05. At the bottom left, the clock "6:12 PM" sits above the date "JUL 04 1998", and the date is the biggest line. Title: At 2.15 seconds a title types itself over the empty top of the first shot, one letter every 0.075 seconds, with a typewriter click for each letter. It is large yellow (#ffe23a) pixel letters on the left, on two lines: "SUMMER" and "OF '98". A block cursor blinks after the last letter. The title blinks off at about 5.2 seconds. Shots: Each shot holds two bars of the song, about four seconds, and every cut lands on a downbeat. The cuts fall at 1.6, 5.45, 9.36, 13.33 and 17.32 seconds, and the last shot ends at 21.36 seconds. The order is the family with the dog, the dandelion, the parents with their son, the marshmallows, then the sunset. Two cuts tear with a tracking glitch: the one into the parents and son at 9.36 seconds, and the one into the sunset at 17.32 seconds. The picture breaks up for about half a second, a glitch sound plays, and the word "TRACKING" appears with a 12-cell bar for 1.4 seconds. The lit cell hunts left and right until it settles in the middle. No other cut glitches. Music: A gentle smooth jazz track at about 123 beats per minute plays low, like it is playing in the room. It starts just before PLAY and fades in over about a third of a second. Ending: The last shot fades to black over 2.4 seconds, together with the music, and the display dims. At 21.4 seconds the display says "■ STOP" over black, the counter stops, and the button clicks again. The film ends at about 22.6 seconds.


