Design: Short-Form Videos, Either You Love It or You Hate It

 Over the course of the pandemic, it has become apparent that the consumption of short-form videos has become a staple in the daily lives of the average Filipino—along with rice and Facebook. In fact, despite not being an active user of Tiktok, the leading social media platform for trending short videos, I shamefully admit to often scrolling through FB reels on a whim, and putting myself to sleep by watching IG reels of my favorite food content creator.

Clearly, what better way to tell a message about the superstitions surrounding ukay-ukay than by using a TikTok video?

Dubbing it “Hukay-Ukay,” we pitched the idea to our digital storytelling class: in a series of Tiktok videos following a GRWM (get ready with me) format, an influencer goes thrifting in an ukayan, unknowingly purchasing and bringing home a cursed object. Still following a GRWM format, the series sprinkles elements of horror—cracked mirrors, flickering lights, strange shadows, and the like—as the influencer slowly realizes that they are being haunted. At the end of the series, she realizes that something is terribly wrong, yet she still asks help from her audience to give her an idea of what to do, a testament to how the perpetually online tend to substitute digital interactions as a crutch for their poor decision-making abilities.

In semiotic stratification, design refers to the area where the material to realize the discourse is considered. As such, it is also important to think about the medium. In Hukay-Ukay, our group decided to go for the Tiktok route due to its simplicity. Anyone can make a TikTok video, a fact that can be taken positively or negatively. However, it stands that due to its simplicity and the ease of interface in creating these types of short-form videos, there is more autonomy and freedom of creativity in expressing what needs to be expressed.

It also helps that everyone in the group is familiar with different formats of short-form reels due to the sheer amount of content references on social media platforms. Thus, when creating our pitch for the Hukay-Ukay Project, there wasn’t much difficulty in my group mates understanding the script I made, which greatly helped in their storyboarding process.  

Click here to view the PDF form of our presentation.

A screen capture of the script that I wrote for the reels series. Full script found here.

A sample of Storyboard 1, which my groupmate, Jannah, made. Photo from our PDF presentation.

A sample of Storyboard 2, which my groupmate, Samantha, made. Photo from our PDF presentation.