Video Edits
Silent-first edits for a feed with the sound off
A caption system that survives being watched muted at arm’s length.
- Client
- Saffron House
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Edit, motion, captioning
- Stack
- Premiere Pro, After Effects
- +48% Average watch time
- 4 Words on screen, max
- 1 Template, reusable
01 The brief
Reels performing well on saves, badly on watch time. The edits were built around a voiceover most viewers never heard.
02 The brainstorm
The mistake was treating captions as an accessibility add-on rather than as the actual script.
We rebuilt the edit muted, on a phone, at arm's length — which is the real viewing condition — and anything that stopped making sense got recut. Captions became the primary layer: two to four words at a time, one idea per card, timed to the cut rather than to the speech.
Sound design then went back on top as a bonus, not a dependency. Every edit now works twice.
03 The build
A reusable caption template with fixed safe margins, a two-weight type pair, and a hard rule of no more than four words on screen at once.
04 The result
Average watch time rose by roughly half. The same template has since been handed to their in-house person and the edits still look like ours.
