Hemming Pants

I suppose I’ll be learning how to hem pants. Seems to be a pretty useful life skill, and since I’ve done some sewing in the past, I don’t think the learning curve will be too steep, though most of the hand sewing I’ve done was to make little plushies and such rather than anything practical.

Belle offered to teach me how to hem pants, so I think I’ll take her up on that once we both have time. In the meantime, I’ve resorted to YouTube. Pants hemming seems to be one of those things were there’s one loose generally-accepted way to do it and a million “lifehacky” or shortcut ways to do it, so sifting through the latter to find the former was a bit difficult. I found a few good videos, though.

Most videos also seem to concern themselves with hemming dress pants, so they’re attempting to have the seam be invisible externally. It seems to be easy to have the seams be externally visible if need be, though, such as for a pair of jeans. As distilled from a variety of videos made by people who seem like they’re perhaps seamstresses or at least sewing hobbyists rather than random people doing a quick fix, the rough steps seem to be:

1. Turn the end of the pant leg inside out, unpick the current hem, and turn the pants back right side out.
2. Have whoever the pants are being tailored for try on the pants, then cuff up the pants so the bottom of the cuff is where the eventual desired hemline will be, and pin in place.
3. Mark a distance up from the bottom of the cuff where the hemline will be, somewhere in the realm of one to two inches; the measurement doesn’t really matter as long as it’s long enough to cuff over on itself by an additional 1/4 inch or so. Trim off the excess fabric above the marked line.
4. Turn the pants inside side out, then re-cuff the pants (so the outside is facing out on the cuff) so that the length from the bottom of the cuff to the raw edge of the fabric is the length you determined in step three.
5. Fold the top of the cuff under on itself by about 1/4 inch, so the edge is now between the right-side-out part of the cuff and the inside-out part of the pants.
6. Sew a seam through all three layers of fabric. (There are a thousand different ways to do this, but most people seem to just use a running stitch, sometimes modifying it to only go through a few threads on the inside-out part of the pants so the seam doesn’t show from the outside.

Then, you’re about done. Lots of tutorials suggest using pins and/or an iron to help you set the cuff in step five and the meta-cuff in step six, and while I can probably get pins, I don’t have an iron and have no practical need for one, so that probably won’t be happening.

Anyway, here’s my condensed notes from this exploration process so far.

For October 26, 2020

All of the in-class videos were cool; I liked most of them, especially the easy bread video (and the included song). It seems the overarching quality of a good video falls to clear communication, which is a pretty flexible idea considering all the videos we watched were trying to communicate different things, but it was very clear when a video was not communicating itself well, as in the videos we watched at the end. Essentially, the videos I felt that communicated themselves best had a mindful sense of mise-en-scene — framing everything to include only what was relevant, were visually appealing (especially in the case of the animated ones), pandered to their audience (the Ram truck ad with the whole farmer spiel being a good example of that), involved my emotions as a viewer to clarify what I was meant to get out of it (the Dear Hollie one being a good example as it made me want to happy cry and the GoPro one appealing to a sense of excitement associated with adventure), and was easy to follow in terms of continuity, which segues nicely into the McCloud comic.

I actually felt like I got more out of the Understanding Comics excerpt in the google drive, perhaps because I actually do already know a fair bit about how effective comics work and already know how to identify when certain effects are being used. I felt the points about different kinds of transitions and the extent of closure that’s necessary between them will be very useful for this how-to-video in particular, but are also just helpful in any kind of sequential storytelling. It seems that to create the most efficient how-to video, leaving not too much for the viewer to have to figure out, focusing on using action-to-action transitions within the pants hemming process will prove the most helpful.

I tried to keep these in mind when beginning my storyboard. I know we were supposed to just do the storyboard with photos to save time, but this ended up being pretty counterintuitive for me since hand-sewing isn’t exactly fast, pants aren’t cheap, and you can’t really un-hem pants to reuse the same pair again, so I went ahead and drew some thumbnails to make sure I would have at least a pretty good sense of where I was going before I started going through nonrenewable materials. Then, I got to sewing.

For this first round, I know I have some improvements to make, but I knew a fair amount of them going into it already. Primarily, the thread matches my pants pretty exactly, but all I have right now is black thread and grey pants, so I know that’s something I’ll have to ensure is higher-contrast by the end product. I’m considering using embroidery floss, which might show up better, but I also want these pants to be something I can wear at the end of this process, so I don’t want them to look too crazy. I also had to shoot most of the shots myself, balancing my phone on my knees or propping it up against stuff, since for whatever reason, studio was completely empty this afternoon for most of the time I was in there. It would be nice if I could get my hands on a tripod, but mine is back at home in Texas, and the technology lending service is still closed for corona, as far as I’m aware. So, I’ll probably MacGyver some setup to hang my phone from the metal bars in the ceiling. Once I get that figured out, I’ll be able to do some closer-up shots for the fine needlework, which should help clarify any confusion.

For October 29, 2020

My main takeaways from the class storyboard review was techniques on how to ensure our videos/storyboards communicate as clearly and concisely as possible, which mainly included:

• eliminating any possible sources of distraction in the video, such as my high-contrast shoes, and ensuring whoever’s doing the modeling in the video (me, in the case of my video) isn’t wearing any distracting clothing
• ensuring the lighting is good so it’s easy to see what’s going on
• keeping in mind a logical starting point and ending point, so the audience knows where the video is going at the front end and doesn’t feel left hanging by the back end
• make sure every shot serves a purpose, and that there’s nothing superfluous

With that in mind, I made some changes to my storyboard. I started grouping scenes together into shots to try to get a sense of how I wanted the video to flow, making sure all the shots were from a “first person” POV, so that my hands were always coming in from the bottom of the frame. I also switched from cutting the hem of my pants to simply folding up the bottom seam in order to save time and material costs. Finally, as per the suggestion in class that we title the frames on our storyboard to ensure we knew what purpose they were serving, I wrote brief descriptions for each scene.

I then got to filming. I figured out a tripod situation by making a cardboard sleeve for my phone to fit in with a cutout over the camera lens, hanging it from the head of my desk lamp using some yarn and tape, and clipping my desk lamp to my studio desk, moving the arm so that I could get a good overhead shot without casting a shadow. I started filming with my blue pants, but they presented issues when it got round to showing that you need to turn them inside out once you’ve cuffed up the bottom to your desired length of hemming. It takes too long to actually show me turning the pants inside out manually (and that whole action doesn’t fit in the frame), but it was weird to jump-cut between the pants right-side out and inside out, since the inside of the pants looks very similar to the outside (unlike jeans or something where there’s an obvious difference), so I sort of hit a wall there and instead switched to using my pair of jean shorts.

For these, I increased the available working area in my shot by clipping my desk lamp to that stepladder that floats around studio and pushing it up next to my desk, raising it up. This helped, and combined with the fact that denim looks very different on the outside than the inside, I got a whole draft done. I did, however, have to switch from a backstitch (which produces a much nicer final product) to a running stitch due to time constraints.

I ran into a number of issues with this first draft, which I anticipated. I primarily feel like I’ve not used my time super effectively, but I’m not sure yet how to fix that — I’ll want to see what other people do on theirs. I’m not sure what is and isn’t important — do I assume the viewer knows they need to thread a needle and knot the end of the thread before they start sewing, or do I have to show them that? Do I need some sort of indication that once you’ve done one leg, you do the same to the other, or is that obvious? — all that kind of stuff.

I also need to get a better sense of what I can do with closure. I have a few transitions I’m not sure what to do with — how do I indicate the shorts have been turned inside out? How do I indicate that the running stitch goes all the way around the leg? I’m not sure yet, being the only person who’s looked at this video, when I’m making too much of a jump and when I’m going painfully slow on an obvious transition.

I’ll be interested in what everyone has to say during peer review on Thursday. I know I want to somehow make this more efficient, but I’m not sure how. I also feel like I want an opening and closing shot of actually wearing the pants, unhemmed and hemmed, but I’m not sure how to demonstrate that the shorts need to be hemmed, since they’re not obviously too long, like a long pair of pants. I’m considering picking out the hem I did on my first pair of pants for storyboarding and using that pair, since they’re clearly too long when they’re not hemmed, but I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll try to make the blue pants work.

For November 3, 2020

Draft two of How To Hem Pants 101 is complete:

A big difference between this version and the last one is the inclusion of sound. I correctly predicted that the morning after Halloween would be a quiet morning in studio, so I was able to record with sound this time. Julia mentioned that she really liked being able to hear what I was doing, though she didn’t specify why. I like it since I feel like it puts you a bit more in the moment of what’s happening in the video, so I’m going to shoot my next draft in similarly quiet conditions.

I also made my video more efficient, I think, by making my shots more informative (as demonstrated by my storyboards) and by better employing jumpcuts. I included a beginning and end shot of me wearing the shorts for context, as well as showed me cuffing up the shorts while wearing them to demonstrate that you just cuff them up to your desired length.

I also employed a lot more jumpcuts, not just in subject-to-subject transitions but within scenes themselves to cut out parts that aren’t informative to the viewer, like the interval between me cuffing up the shorts and measuring the cuff with a ruler, where I’m just groping offscreen for the ruler and my piece of tape. I think it makes the video flow much better and makes it so I can get more condensed information in the same period of time.

There are still a few transitions I’m not all the way cool with, though. I think the turning back right-side-out of the shorts at the end is jumpy; I go from beginning to turn the shorts the other way out to them just suddenly being on the table right-side-out. Because the initial shot of my putting the shorts down on the table after cuffing them up while wearing them doesn’t contain such a transition, I think I’ll change it to be just a jumpcut somehow from inside out to right-side-out so it’ll match. It would be nice if I could throw it down on the table again but right-side-out this time, but it doesn’t make that much sense, since the shorts are already on the table. So, that’s sort of a problem area I want to ask people about in studio to get some spontaneous peer review.

I also want to put jumpcuts into the closeup of me beginning the running stitch. I feel like there’s some dead space where I’m just pulling the needle offscreen where nothing useful is being communicated, so I’ll try to cut those parts out.

The other difference is smaller; I borrowed and iron to press down the cuff of the shorts before I started stitching them. It made my life a lot easier, though I’m concerned that since the iron was a little portable travel iron, it won’t read as an archetypal iron and the viewer might be a bit thrown off by its size in the materials shot at the beginning, before they see me using it. However, I have absolutely no use for a clothes iron outside of this project and therefore can’t justify buying one, I haven’t found anyone who can lend me a normal-looking iron, and trying to hem pants without somehow sticking down the edges is kind of a nightmare (I’m avoiding using pins because I personally find putting them in and taking them out distracting for the purposes of this video) so that’s just going to be a battle I’m not going to pick.

Other issues I think I want to address include the framing in a few of the shots (in the sewing closeup, the pulling of the fabric as the needle went through caused the seam of the shorts to move up to the top of the frame, making it feel off-centered) and the lighting (on the wide shot of me sewing the seam of the shorts, the shadows are very bright. I think I’ll fix this like I fixed the other light that points at my desk, by taping a sheet of printer paper over the light, or by dragging the big diffused lightbox over to my desk and setting it up somehow.)

So, in conclusion and for personal reference…

Things to improve on:

• fix the inside out to right side out transition
• add jumpcuts to the closeup of sewing
• center the closeup of the seam stitching in the frame
• diffuse the lighting on the wide shots

I’m really happy with the improvements I made on this round, however. I think the video is much easier to understand and is much closer to a final product. I’ll be interested in seeing what people have to say about peer review; I hope people can come up with some things to point out that haven’t crossed my mind yet.

For November 8, 2020

Here’s the final draft of Pants Hemming: The Epic Saga!

The asynchronous peer review was helpful. On the whole, people liked the audio and felt the pacing was good, so I used the same clip lengths for each step in the final process.

As for areas of improvement, I took three main comments to heart:

• Despite scissors being used in the video, none were shown in the shot with all the supplies
• The part where I finished the hem and tied it off was difficult to follow with the jumpcuts
• The part where I tap the finished hem, tap the unfinished hem, and then cut to a shot where both legs are hemmed is jumpy (though I didn’t really know if people meant jumpy as in the cut was skipping over too much or jumpy as in the shorts physically migrated between the two cuts).

Since my shorts were already hemmed from last time, I figured out which order to do my shots in in reverse, dismantling my hemming step-by-step and only sewing as much as was going to be in each frame, since it would save me from having to unhem and completely re-hem the shorts.

I ended up interpreting the jumpiness comments as concern over the physical distance traveled, since I agree that the shorts suddenly moving makes it hard to track what’s going on. Showing the same hemming process for the other leg felt redundant, so I think this wasn’t what the peer reviewers were asking for.

Filming that transition was a nightmare; it took me almost an hour. I came into studio on Friday morning, a time I know nobody is ever there, to make sure everything would be quiet, so that was at least one less factor to worry about. However, I had lots of other exciting issues regardless:

• I discovered that the zoom feature on an iPhone camera isn’t super precise — there’s a bit of a range that the camera considers to be “0.6% zoom”, so it was nearly impossible to get both the both-hemmed shot and the one-hemmed shot to be the same amount of zoom.
• Even by drawing light pencil marks on the table to give myself a point of reference to line the unhemmed shorts up where the hemmed ones had gone, even (apparent?? I never moved the thing) tiny changes to the position of the stepladder holding the tripod made that precaution completely useless.
• I couldn’t even get the angle of my phone to match up from shot to shot, so I kept having issues where the one-unhemmed shot was keystoned compared to the both-hemmed shot, which is fixable in iPhone video editing, but causes the size of the shorts in the frame to change just enough for the transition to be distracting.
• The only way to check the shots with a jumpcut between them is by importing them into iMovie, so I had to do this after every single shot to see if it worked. It was not a fast process.

I eventually opted to do an extra-wide shot of the one-hemmed and simply crop and zoom it until the shorts lined up sufficiently, which was what finally worked.

The scissors issue was thankfully an easy fix; I simply reshot the supplies shot to include them. The finish-and-tie-off confusion was also a pretty easy fix, I simply switched the shot over to one that’s one take with no cuts. I was also lucky to get that shot on the first take. Sewing is pretty difficult in the extreme close-up shots, since it’s already hard to hold onto the needle once your hands start sweating under the box lights, and any mistake you make is amplified into a major distraction from the actual hemming, forcing you to start the shot over. Even though this shot went well on the first take, most of the other sewing shots took several attempts.

I also addressed my concern about harsh shadows on the wide sewing shot by reshooting it using a box light, which provided much more diffused light. For good measure, I redid the needle thread and tying (I was inspired by how clean it was in Spoorthi’s video) and did a new inside-out transition shot, which completed all the needed shots on my checklist. From then, it was simply a matter of stitching the replacement shots into the existing movie file, and I was just about done.

I feel like I learned a lot from this project! In terms of my working process, I figured out that the drawn storyboards work really well for me in terms of video planning — unlike the photo storyboards, they were quick and easy to do multiple iterations of, and I could annotate directly on top of them.

When it came to communication through the visuals, audio, motion, and time, I think I learned the most from time. I’ve never done something where I’ve relied so heavily on jumpcuts to bridge time, but I really liked how concise it made the video. I also enjoyed learning how to create this brevity by figuring out what only the most essential steps were — determining how much you’ll hem, measuring, flipping, folding up the cuff, sewing it, doing the other side, and turning them back out — and showing them without being redundant or so brief as to be uninformative. If you ask anyone who knows me well enough, they’ll tell you how much I appreciate brevity in communicated information, but I’ve never really consciously extended this desire for brevity to videos. I’ll definitely be applying these new skills for noticing and creating brevity in videos in the future.

Audio was also an interesting source of communication I’ve never tapped into before. I was surprised at the extent to which people said it helped the communication of the video, so I’ll have to be more conscious about using it in the future.

This project also made me consciously think about transitions in a way I haven’t before. I feel like I’m much more comfortable with still transitions like you’d see in comic books; I don’t have much experience with motion media. I ended up playing with them to string drastically different shots together (for example, between the supply shot and the initial wearing shot, I dragged the shorts offscreen to try to avoid a sudden switch of environments), which was a new experience for me. I’d like to get more proficient at using them well.

My final point of intrigue was how different I had to make this process from how I might go about it alone to an instructional video. I expected switching thread colors to be more visible and maintaining a consistent, first-person POV, but beyond just cutting shots to be as concise as possible, I had to fundamentally reduce the process itself — no trimming, no fancy stitches; just a single fold-up and a running stitch. I think these videos were almost too drastic in how much I had to reduce the process, actually — I mean, you can hem pants with a running stitch, but there are much nicer ways to do it that unfortunately eat up way too much of a minute-long video to feasibly demonstrate. Despite this, I do think I now have a much better handle on watching someone do something vs showing them how to do something.

Plus, I now have a nice pair of shorts, albeit hemmed in quite a contrasting thread color.