This is a guide to help you create a captioned video with multiple shots and a voiceover in Adobe Spark.
Plan, record, prepare
- Plan your shots before you film.
- Record your shots and interview clips using the camera app on your phone. Try to record 30-second clips, even if you think you’ll only end up using 10 seconds, to give you flexibility.
- Storyboard your video – choose which shots you’re going to use, which clips of your interviews you want to appear, and write your voiceover script.
- Edit your interview clips using your phone’s in-built video editing app. This may be iMovie on iPhones or Google Photos on Android. You can trim them later in Adobe Spark but there’s a limit to the size of video you can upload so it’s best to save them in smaller chunks.
- Save your clips and shots to the cloud so you can access them on your computer. You can use your university OneDrive account, or even upload them directly to the Files section of your newsday channel in Teams. Just make sure you know how to download them. It’s a good idea to save them in a dedicated folder/album with the name of your story.
- Download your clips to your computer.
- Your video clips need to be in .mp4 format. Android phones do this automatically but iPhones save videos as .mov files. There are lots of websites that will convert files for you, but the safest way is to use the VLC Media Player. Here’s a guide to converting your files.
Note: If you’ve recorded your interviews over Zoom or MS Teams, they should already be saved as mp4 files on your computer. You will still need to edit the video to take out small chunks of interview clips on your computer before uploading to Adobe Spark though as the whole video file will be too large.
Using Adobe Spark
Go to spark.adobe.com.
Use one of the left-hand options to log in. I prefer to Continue with Google so I don’t have to remember any new passwords.
Once you’re signed up and logged in, click on the + symbol on the left and choose video – ignore all the templates on offer.
Give your video a title – this is the headline.
Choose ‘Start from scratch’ – again, ignore the templates.
Now you can start adding your clips and captions – use your storyboard.
Use the options on the right to add captions. You can also change the style and colours, and choose to have music or not – if you’ve got audio clips and voiceover then turn the music off.
You can also resize the video to be square, if it’s for Instagram, for example.
If your audio sounds a bit quiet, there’s a hidden edit menu to boost this:
Click in the top-right corner of each slide to find the edit pencil, then click the volume icon and ‘loud’.
You can also re-edit your clips from this secret menu using the scissor icon.
Once you’ve got all your clips in and captions written, you can record the voiceover.
Find the spot you want to start recording at, and click and hold the microphone icon to speak directly into your laptop’s microphone. You can record over it if you need to do it again.
Use the preview button above the video to keep checking your video, then download when you’re ready.
Watch the downloaded version to make sure it’s right. Go back to Spark and make any edits if necessary.
Sharing and embedding your video
Click ‘Share’ above your video to publish it.
Make sure the title is a decent headline, and give it a subtitle if you like.
Then click ‘Create link’.
It’ll take a few minutes.
You’ll get a link that you can copy and paste straight into the WordPress block editor to embed your video.
You can also use the other sharing links to publish your video straight to social media, and even to Teams – so you can share it straight away on your Newsday channel!
You can also download the video and upload it to YouTube. It’s a good idea to do this as streaming from YouTube is a bit faster and more reliable than Spark, and you can save your work as part of your portfolio.
Here’s the same video embedded from YouTube:
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