The assignment — Play It Backward, Jack — is to take a video and reverse it. After the long and painstaking process of doing kinetic typography, I wanted a simple assignment, so I gave this one a shot. I had a short video of rain I shot a while ago while messing around with my camera that I thought might look interesting backwards.

To make this, I imported the video into After Effects. First I sped the video up, turning three minutes or so into twenty seconds. (To do this, click the Layer menu –> Time –> Time Stretch, then enter a number less than 100 to speed up the clip). Then I reversed it (Layer –> Time –> Time Reverse Layer). Then I exported the clip and reopened it in iMovie to add some sounds. I’d first tried to simply reverse the existing audio, but it came out really badly. My camera makes a strange clicking noise whenever I shoot a video, and it overshadowed the rain sounds. So instead I ended up searching for “rain” in my music files and came up with Tahiti Rain Song by Cocorosie, which I thought matched the pace of the reversed raindrops decently.