313 people liked this little edit on YouTube. That's still a number I remember.
Back in 2022, during the pandemic, we were all stuck at home. Lockdown boredom hits different — you run out of shows, out of games, out of anything to do. So I opened Alight Motion on my phone and started making things move.
This edit was inspired by Qwerty, another editor whose work I really looked up to at the time. Watching their presets got me curious about how much you could actually pull off on a phone — so I started experimenting on my own.
What came out of it was a short Alight Motion preset set to "Buwan" by Juan Karlos. It was made entirely on my phone, from scratch — no desktop software, no fancy rigs, just a screen, a timeline, and a lot of patience. Every keyframe, every transition, every beat sync was tapped out by hand.
The "preset" part is the key: I shared it as a preset that other people could use. That's what made the difference. I wasn't just posting a video into the void — I was handing people something they could pick up and make their own. And that's how it spread. People found it, used it, re-shared it. It started reaching people I'd never met.
Four years later, it sits at around 4.8K views and 313 likes.
For a video made on a phone during lockdown, that still feels unreal. There are videos I've spent weeks on since then that never came close. I think about that a lot: it wasn't the most technically impressive thing I've ever made — but it was the one that found its audience.
That little edit taught me something I still carry into my work today: you don't need the most powerful tools to make something people connect with. You just need to make something worth sharing.
If you want to see it (or use the preset), the edit is up on my YouTube channel — watch it here. And if you made it this far, thanks for reading. I've got a few more throwback edits from that era — maybe I'll dig them up next.