For this project, I had some footage of fire trucks blocked on their way to an emergency. I found it tricky to explain what was happening with words alone so I took a creative reach and learned the basics of Adobe After Effects to add annotations to the video.

To do this, I found asking questions to Claude about After Effects to be tremendously useful. Every suggestion it gave worked on the first try.

I also used ScrollyVideo in conjunction with scrollama to have article text scroll by in sync with the footage.

Were I to revisit this project or do a similar one going forward, I would be interested in implementing it using Svelte. There is a Scroll Video template that seems pretty straight forward. I encountered a scary "works on my machine" problem with some of the scroll timings when deploying this project here on github pages. They mysteriously resolved themselves but it left me wary and in search of another stack for doing video scrollers.