Repair Cafe Gosport

2025

Summary

Repair Cafe Gosport runs monthly events for people to bring in items to be repaired by volunteers while they learn how to fix things themselves in the process. While volunteering at this Repair Cafe, I’ve attended 2 monthly events where I captured photos and videos of the repairs and created a few on-the-day edits. Between these events, I’ve spent many hours editing various videos for Repair Cafe Gosport’s socials, which include Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Some of these edited videos are more aimed at attracting new people to bring in items to repair, and others are more useful for appealing to possible new volunteers. Overall, I spent 34 hours either working on projects remotely or attending events with Repair Cafe Gosport, all of which are outlined below.

Quote

“Their new creative input to our social media has helped reach 31,000 people and grow our followers by 3% in that time. This is vital to gaining new volunteers and people within the community whom we can help. Ekko has become a respected member of our team, a highly reliable volunteer who takes on tasks and executes them with very little follow-up supervision required.“ - Keith Brady (Chair, Repair Cafe Gosport)

Projects

Event Photography

Since joining Repair Cafe Gosport’s volunteer team, I have attended and captured photos and videos of 2 of their events, their March event at Gosport Town Hall and their April event at Thorngate Halls. For each of these, I travelled to Gosport for 10am until the end of each event at 1 or 2pm.

I use my phone camera to record videos and photos of any visually interesting repairs, items being brought in, or volunteers talking to attendees. Then, whenever an item is fixed, I or the marketing lead take photos of the item and the person who brought it in with a “Fixed!“ sign in front of the Repair Cafe Gosport banner. During the events, I try to capture photos ready to be posted quickly and capture videos suitable for future editing rather than focusing on perfect footage only. This occasionally means thinking of any unique video ideas too, to capture footage for editing later on.

After returning from the events, I sort through all photos and videos I took to delete any that shouldn’t be used, do minor colour correction edits to pictures if needed, then upload them to that month’s shared Google Drive. Reasons for photos or videos being unusable include being blurry, boring, duplicates, including knives (causes issues with Instagram policies) or including people who don’t want to be photographed/shared.

I then organise these folders for both my convenience when editing and the convenience of the other marketing volunteers when posting, separating photos from videos and putting all of the “Fixed!“ photos in a dedicated folder.

Introductory Video

I joined Repair Cafe at the end of February, after their February event and before their March event. Other volunteers had captured many videos from the February event that hadn’t been edited, so these were shared with me to edit before my first actual event in March. Looking at their Instagram grid, there was no content explaining what Repair Cafe Gosport was, so after researching the socials of other Repair Cafes, I chose to create a short explainer/introduction video using February’s footage.

The 2 primary things that Keith wanted highlighted were that Repair Cafe volunteers help fix items and teach attendees how to fix things themselves. Considering the various impacts of Repair Cafes, I decided that the 3 primary benefits of attending an event were saving money, time, and reducing the environmental impacts of buying new items. So these were the key points I chose to include in my video, along with specific examples of items that can be fixed at Repair Cafe Gosport.

The video itself is mostly made up of video footage from February’s event with animated text over the top, edited to cut in time to the royalty-free “inspirational “ music I chose. All footage in the final video was edited with the Lumetri Colour effect to adjust the colouration to be more vibrant and have higher contrast to the font. The text is animated using keyframes on either the source text itself or a crop effect to hide certain parts of the text, and has a shadow effect to lift it from the background clips. At the end of the video, Repair Cafe Gosport’s animated logo is layered over the final video clip, with a frame hold at the end.

To emphasise Repair Cafe Gosport's environmental impact, I included a screen recording of their statistics from their events. I was given access to this data once I joined as a volunteer and used it to calculate the information I shared in the video. I also used this data to find the most common types of items fixed at events. After confirming that this website and data are open to the public, I screen recorded it to use in place of event footage for part of the final video.

Once I finished the 1st draft of this video, I set it to Repair Cafe Gosport for feedback. Their marketing lead, Nick, then mentioned I needed to consider Instagram “Safe Zones“, which I had forgotten to check. In my original edit, the text was much closer to the sides of the video, with some elements being too close to the bottom. So I downloaded a few Safe Zone templates from online to rearrange the font to ensure it would be readable with Instagram’s overlays. After correcting this with a few other minor changes too, the video was approved and posted.

Volunteer Interview

During Repair Cafe Gosport’s March event, me and Priyal (another marketing volunteer), took some time to interview one of the repair volunteers, Gary, during some of his downtime between projects. I then spent some time editing this into an Instagram Reel for Repair Cafe Gosport’s socials. This was recorded/edited with the aim to appeal to other prospective volunteers, rather than new attendees specifically.

Initially, the interview was 5 minutes long, but I cut this down to under 1 minute to better fit Instagram Reels and appeal to the short attention span of Repair Cafe Gosports' audience. I used royalty-free music from Adobe’s Essential Sound library for the background music and adjusted the footage’s sound settings to clarify Gary’s talking. I manually added the captions to best fit what he was saying, be clear and easy to read, and positioned high enough not to be covered by Instagram’s overlays.

Additional Edits

This video was recorded, edited and posted the morning of Repair Cafe Gosport’s March event to show attendees how to find Repair Cafe at the community event they were part of that month. I used Canva to edit the video on my phone, allowing me to change the speed of the video at different points. Before posting the video, we added music and overlayed text in Meta Business Suite to make it more appealing and useful for viewers.

Similar to the previous edit, this video was filmed, edited, and posted on the day to show viewers how to find Repair Cafe Gosport at their April event at Thorngate Halls. We once again added music and overlayed text before posting it using Meta’s Business Suite. However, this time we also shared it with a few Facebook groups as we posted. This significantly impacted its viewership, reaching far more people than usual on Facebook with over 16k views.

This video is a highlight reel from Repair Cafe Gosport’s April event, with numerous short clips of repairs to music from Adobe’s Essential Sound library. Some background noise from the recorded footage was re-added at a low volume to add more life to the video and better communicate the event’s atmosphere. However, this audio was taken from a single separate clip rather than the audio from the clips shown in the video. This is to stop the background noise from cutting frequently and creating a jarring effect.

Judging from past viewer statistics, Repair Cafe Gosport’s audience appears to have attention spans of 7 seconds, with views dropping off of videos after that point. This video was edited to both appeal to this fact and test it. The video consists of a single clip from April’s event of one of Repair Cafe Gosport’s volunteers teaching a child to be able to repair his VR controller himself in the future. A text overlay is used to clarify what is being fixed, to appeal to others with similar devices that need fixing, and to emphasise the core aim of Repair Cafe Gosprt that is being demonstrated in the video.