Videography

I make videos for fun… everyone needs a hobby :)

I really don’t have a point to this stuff – Generally, I like optical gadgets, and learning new skills, and music: and videography is intersection of all three. I’m always better at taking the videos than sharing them, although lately I’ve sharpened my technique to increase my ‘time to share’ velocity.

I have *hundreds* of hours of backlog – I bought the first available consumer MiniDV camcorder way before most folks had heard of HD, and my first 1080i camcorder before flat panels were a thing (and yes, I mean ‘i’. 1080p happened later), but most of that footage is still sitting in a box waiting for me to do something with it, taunting me. At least I know my kids grew up being filmed in kind of HD.

I was more into the ‘experience and playing with toys to record it’ than ‘sharing the experience’ for a long time, and as much as I love you, Dear Reader, I still do this mostly for myself. I’m not artistic – acquiring the technical skills like getting the right exposure and depth of field is easy for me, but knowing how to use them to make art is, well, hard. I think I’ve settled on a style, though.

Here is the first video I felt really proud of – I basically stole really good music to tell a story about a family event.

While I cringe a bit at the video quality (this was filmed on a Panasonic LX3 – amazing for 2009, but put to shame by and phone camera these days), I’m happy with the composition and storytelling.

Many years later, I made the following video, mostly filmed on GoPros and an older Canon DSLR. Again, I borrow amazing music to showcase my video, and edit carefully to it; in this case, that was super hard given this was entirely edited on an iPhone. I’m not happy with the pacing (I only used about 10% of what I shot), but I am with the end result.

I have a massive backlog of video, even from trips that I’ve already created like Galapagos (and before! I have about a dozen trips I haven’t made videos about, from the Rhine to Antartica). To break the logjam, I’m thinking of breaking the flow into a Trailer, which takes a lot of careful editing, and more almost-raw video. For example, here is a video set to music from a recent trip to Idyllwild, followed by a raw bike ride around the place:

This is the approach I’m using for Antartica: the sheer mass of content I captured there could runs hours, and I really don’t want to drop it on the ‘edit room floor’. I know the raw video will be boring for you Dear Readers, but I’m doing this for myself, for the thrill of honing my skills as much as to remember some amazing experiences. For example, there is no universe in which a 40 minute video of me kayaking around icebergs is interesting to anyone, but I’ll post it here anyway, ‘cuz it’s my website :)

And, I’m getting better at producing things quickly. That Galapagos video took 2 months. I’m still working on the Antartica video, one year later. But this weekend I pooped out two videos, each edited in under 30 minutes.