10 years since Terraformars

I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but 2026 marks the 10-year anniversary of my final uni project, Terraformars. Even though it’s a decade old, it feels more recent because I did a small redesign and a behance blog post back in December 2019, but it was originally designed at my parents’ house in the scorchingly hot summer of 2016.

Because I barely knew anything about paper engineering back then, I spent a week studying “The Pop-up Channel” videos and making all the cards Duncan showed in his tutorials. It felt overwhelming but I learned so much, and I think it shows in the final product. While most of the mechanisms are really simple, they show a basic understanding of pop-up making that I honestly still use to this day. Looking back on the book, there are so many things I’d change to make it better: some of the v-folds tore because of the tension, some flaps don’t work as intended, but that reassures me that I’ve grown and learned.

To celebrate this 10th anniversary, and in the spirit of Duncan Birmingham’s tutorials, I decided to shoot a small series of videos for ig and tiktok where I shared some of the mechanisms I featured in the book. The tutorials would show increasing difficulty: the first video being a simple v-fold, to end up with the third and last video featuring a pull-tab mechanism. Although I initially thought the process would be easy, my experience filming a Domestika course should have taught me otherwise, that these processes are more complicated than you think. First, I filmed all the overhead shots in one go, so they would have a consistent look and rhythm. I edited them immediately after to check if they were clear enough or if I needed to reshoot anything.

That first cut was around 3 minutes, and my fear of low attention span in social media pushed me to cut them down to a shorter length. Once that was done, I filmed the additional parts of me explaining the whole series and the voiceovers the same week I intended to post.

The final results are these three videos that were uploaded between May and June 2026:  

Although I was afraid that the fast pace of these videos would make it hard to follow, it seems that people enjoyed them. Ten years after designing my graduation thesis by watching someone’s video tutorials I still feel like I barely know what I’m doing, but who knows, maybe there’s someone who’s watching my tutorials and finishing their own project.