Donut Selfie Tutorial

Photography Tips

Tired of the same old selfies? Karen Cheng offers a new take on the self-portrait by creating a “donut selfie” video montage with an iPhone in the following video:

Wondering how she did it? In the following video, Cheng provides an easy-to-follow tutorial:

Tips for Making a Donut Selfie Video

The basic concept here is to take your smartphone, point it at your temple, and move it in a circle around your face. Cheng offers the following tips:

• Using the back camera on your phone, with your phone in your left hand, make sure that the camera is at the top right as you look at the back of the phone.
• Start the video. Move the camera to your right temple, and move the phone in a circle around your head with the camera pointing at your face. Your arm should be slightly bent, in order to keep your arm out of the frame. You’ll need to finish the video with the camera held against your left temple.
• Be sure to touch the camera to your head at the beginning and end of your video clip. This will ensure that you create the “fade to black” transition between videos for the montage.
• This takes practice. Deleting videos on the iPhone is easy–feel free to experiment!

Stitching Your Selfies Together

Steps for Creating a Donut Selfie Montage

1. Take a series of selfies using the above technique.
2.  Trim the rough edges of the video (just drag the slider on each edge of the video in your camera roll) so that each section starts with black screen (where the camera met your temple).
3. Get the “iMovie” app. It’ll cost you $4.99 in the App Store.
4. In the iMovie app, import your clip using the “Create Movie” command.
5. At this point, you can edit the speed of your clip by splitting it into sections within the app and altering the speed of each section. You’ll want the beginning and end of each clip set to 2x speed, and you’ll want to set the center section to 1/4 speed.
6. Chain your donut selfies together within the app by adding a new clip to the end of each clip.
7. Save the video to your phone.
8. Upload to your favorite social media sites at your leisure. Cheng encourages you to use the hashtag #donutselfie.

Have you tried out this technique? We’d love to see your results!