talk in front of your time-lapse, on your phone

watch me work is the episode for a day of real work. you record your screen for hours, it becomes a time-lapse, and you talk in front of it. until today the talking had to happen at the computer, in a bubble in the corner. now it works on the phone too, the way people talk in front of a video on instagram and tiktok: the video at the top, you underneath, selfie style.

the screen itself is still recorded on a computer. a phone cannot share what is on your laptop, and that is where the work is anyway: the editor, the terminal, the agents running in their own windows side by side. what changes is the second half. once the time-lapse is made, you can pick up your phone, walk away from the desk, and record your take wherever you are.

why the phone

after hours at a desk the last thing anyone wants is another session in front of the same screen. the take is two minutes of you talking about what you did, and it is better said from the sofa, the kitchen or a walk outside than from the chair you have been stuck in all day. the phone's front camera is also usually better than a laptop's, and it frames you the way people expect to see someone talking on their phone.

it also keeps the habit easy. the hard part of watch me work is already done by the time you finish working: the screen recorded itself. if the take can wait until you are on the train home, the episode still gets made.

how it works

• record your session on a computer as before, press mark this when something happens, and make the time-lapse at the end
• open the episode in the app on your phone; under the cut is your take
• set how long the sped-up screen runs and how many seconds each flag plays at real time, with the minus and plus buttons
• your take runs tells you how long the whole thing will be
• the first preview it or record my take brings the time-lapse onto the phone, once, so it plays smoothly at speed
• record my take counts three, then the time-lapse plays at the top while your front camera films you below it
• it slows to real time at each flag, for as long as you chose, and the take stops when the time-lapse ends
• use this take sends it to be made into the episode; record it again tries again

what the episode looks like

exactly what it looks like when you record the take at the computer. the episode is made once, from your take: your title look and intro, your captions lit word by word in your series' style, you in the bubble, your polish and your outro, with the time-lapse behind you exactly as it played while you talked and the clock in the corner counting the real hours. nothing is reordered and nothing is cut by hand.

the phone keeps a record of how the time-lapse played behind you, second by second, including how fast it really went. so if the phone could not quite play it as fast as you asked, the episode plays it the way you saw it, and when you point at something, it is there.

the same rules as the computer

change the length after recording and you record the take again, because your pointing has to land on what was on screen at that moment. the key check still reads every screen in the time-lapse for api keys and tokens, and anything that looks like one holds the episode until you answer it, on the phone or the web. it is still an episode: numbered, it keeps your streak, and it goes on your page like any other.

a take recorded on the phone and one recorded on the computer are the same thing to underway. record one on the computer, decide you want to say it differently, and record it again on the phone later; the newest take is the one the episode is made from.

start a series and film episode zero for free. start free.