How To Make A Travel Vlog

5 Tips To Upgrade Your Holiday Footage

Travel videos are all the rage right now on social media with more people turning to YouTube to research their travel destinations over conventional guidebooks. Unlike standard informational clips and articles, travel vlogs serve a more inspo role, with it doubling up its standard information role with the whole getting people hyped to travel there.

With that in mind, I thought I’d write a quick post on how to make a great travel vlog using just 5 key points.

1 — Mix Up Your Angles

One of the best ways to keep a travel vlog interesting is to use a variety of camera angles. It may be your vlog, but most people are tuning in to see the surroundings, not you, so make sure that not every angle is a selfie.

For example, drone shots are a great way to set a scene. Whether you’re traversing some mountains, hiking through a jungle, enjoying the beauty of a tropical island or just exploring the side streets of a big city, aerial openers are a great way to set the scene and provide some context to your video.

Similarly, action-cam footage from a GoPro or Osmo Action is great for those high-octane adventures or FPV-style footage that you just can’t get comfortable with a normal vlogging set-up. Just attach it to a helmet or harness and you’re off. Throw in some hyperlapses, some slow-motion, and a healthy dose of you interacting with different parts of your environment and you’ve got the ingredients for a great looking travel vlog!

2 — Tell A Story

Great footage is cool and that, but the key to a great travel vlog is a great story.Whether it’s a romantic weekend away, or a badass adventure holiday, anything that tells a story is going to keep your viewers engaged for longer.

Part of that is to make sure that you have an amazing time on your trip! The saying may go that misery loves company, but it isn’t exactly make for a compelling video. The more exciting and fun you have in your video, the more fun your video, and by extension your destination, will seem. All-in-all it’s a win-win: have fun and your travel vlog will be better.

3 — Keep Transitions in Mind

Whiletoo many transitions can detractfrom the overall story, having some transitions is a great way to move italong and change to a new location.

Now, I’ll do a future post on some easy video transitions for vlogging at some point in the future, but in the meantime, I’ll just say to make sure that you keep some of your transitions in mind while shooting. After all, there’s nothing worse than getting home, importing all of your footage, only to find out that your footage doesn’t match your vision and you’re back at the drawing board!

For example, if you’re shooting a wipe transition between two scenes, remember to make sure the two clips are moving in the same direction for the transition to have the best effect.

For the sake of this quick guide on how to make a travel vlog though, a couple of transitions to keep in mind are the wipe, the cover/ uncover and in/out. Though not suitable for everything, all three are fairly easy to accomplish in-camera with minimal editing and aren’t too distracting from the overall story you’re trying to tell.

4 –Sound Design

Gone are the days of justbeing able to put a popular song on a video and rake in views. A big part of making a great travel vlog, and something that differentiates between a good and great one, is by being able to make the viewer feel as though they are there, immersing them into the video — and sound design is a great way to do just that.From adding tropical bird sounds to a drone shot, or the sound of crashing waves to a shot of the shore, anything you can do to make your video a more immersive experience will be a great asset to the video and keep people engaged for longer.

If you don’t have a varied library of sound effects, not to worry! Sites like Epidemic Sound have a great variety of sound effects and music that can be used on both commercial and personal projects for a low cost!

5 — Editing A Travel Vlog

As with everything, it’s important not to go too overboard with the editing process and take away from the story, not to mention the whole thing will depend on whether you’re editing on an app or using more pro software in Premiere Pro, but there are a few go-to things I like to use depending on the setting colours-wse. For example, when colour grading a sunset, I’ll boost the oranges just to make it seem more magical, while if it’s an island or beach holiday, making the greens of the trees and blues of the sky/ ocean more vibrant just adds to the idyllic-ness of the scene.

That said, when starting out there’s no real need to stress too much about editing. Most camera’s now come in-built with some decent colour profiles which means that once you’ve got your standard structure and transitions in place, it’s kind of good enough for social media as is in many cases.

Hope you found these tips helpful! Be sure to follow this, my new medium for more tutorials, articles and just general creation news!