Halfway through packing for my upcoming holiday to Vietnam, I made a mental note to go charge my camera. And to bring spare batteries. And to check for storage space. And… just like that, I quickly misdirected myself into getting excited about all the pictures I’m gonna take, and all the pictures I’ve taken from my previous holiday trips.
But this time, something hit me.
I’d look back at my Facebook albums, but always find myself speed-clicking through the pictures. They only serve to jog my memory; if I wanted anything more immersive, I go on YouTube to watch videos.
Other people’s videos.
Of the same place I’ve been to.
Why?
Immersion, of course. Right. That’s the power of videos.
Maybe…. I should try making one this time?
Problem is, I’ve never filmed and edited a video before, let alone a travel video, with content that spans days.
But how hard could it be, right?
There it is, the famous last words.
Since I can’t possibly learn how to make a video within days, I decided to harness the power of the 80/20 rule, and figure out the 20% effort that can give me an 80% decent result.
So, I went online to do some (massive) amounts of research, and came out with this 5 step hack for starters.
Now make no mistake: when I say hack, I don’t mean a cheap, 90s looking VCR home video. I call it a hack because after watching 52367 videos, these are the common patterns I observed throughout most of them.
The trick to learn new things, from my experience, is to find patterns. That 20% work that’d give me my 80% result. And I think I’ve managed to cover most of them in my first travel video!
Inspiration
I always find inspiration and exposure a huge factor that contributes to the final quality of anything I work on, be it the 1st time or the 50th time I do it. What style fits better? What do I prefer? What do I NOT like, and want to avoid? These retrospective questions are what gives that constant clarity, direction, and motivation behind the work.
Would you come across as a carbon copy of your inspirations then? Well, if you can achieve that on your 1st try, that means you are the one-in-a-million talent, and you should drop everything now and pursue it to eternity. Ya?
Jokes aside, I believe that when it comes to creativity, everyone has, or will soon develop a style that’s unique to only them. It’s the same for actors, guitarists, artists, writers, programmers, and just about any creative endeavour. Heck, everyone would style an Excel spreadsheet differently.
So with that, I’d like to share some sources that inspired and taught me everything that led to this video.
- Peter McKinnon: Not only are his teaching videos informative, he explains concepts clearly, and demonstrates everything to a tee.
- Shawney Depp: He mainly shares his travel vlogs and video-making tips thru a Singaporean’s perspective, which makes his videos very relatable to me, being a Singaporean as well.
- DiCasa Film: He makes technical topics very digestible, laden with visual examples.
- There are also tons of easy to follow tutorials out there on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to create cool, impactful edits. That in itself is an 80/20 in action!
One memorable inspiration for me is this video by Peter McKinnon. It’s amazing how he managed to make an activity as mundane as coffee-making so interesting, with a great combination of camera angles and sound effects. (It starts at 2:00, if the timestamp isn’t working)
Filming The Video
I approached filming based off photography fundamentals, such as framing, rule of thirds, angles, focal points etc. With those in mind, I lock on to my object/activity of interest, hit the record button, and did 1 of these 4 things:
- Zoom in/out
- Pan left/right
- Tilting up/down
- Leaving it alone
Sounds duh, doesn’t it? Just by playing with the x, y and z-axis, I got all my B-roll type of shots.
Another main type of shot you can get is to place the camera in front of you, get that nice bokeh in the background, and just share your thoughts about the trip so far! These talking segments serve to introduce more variety to your video, giving it a more personal touch, and generally keeping the flow of the video smooth…
…which I didn’t do, because I feel weird talking to a camera. Granted, we should always challenge ourselves, but I’m just more comfortable without it for now. Having fun doing it is more important!
Last note on filming: What about video stability? Use the neck strap.
Editing The Video
I took note to film as much material as possible, so that I can have the freedom of choice to edit…
…only learning that’s exactly the wrong way to go about it, because (a) there’s no theme, (b) it becomes a work trip, and (c) you don’t get to immerse and enjoy yourself.
But hey, I didn’t get to plan my shots! (I took a surprise travel service from Anywhr.co, where I only knew my destination upon reaching the airport. Which meant I couldn’t research or plan what to shoot.)
Combining all I’ve watched and researched, these are the similarities I found based on binge watching videos, giving birth to my grand plan to hack out a video!
- Plan what to film beforehand (as mentioned above). Don’t do it chronologically. A chronological video is boring for a holiday trip, and you can’t control the video’s flow. Instead, set a theme and base everything else around it!
- Find suitable music. This is crucial, because it sets the mood and tone for your video, and will decide how you arrange your clips.
- Cut and arrange clips to the music. I understood this as changing the video clips in sync with the beats. And major drops calls for major scene changes, such that epic shots or going into another activity.
- Add transitions. YouTube is your best friend here. There is a whole plethora of tutorials for Adobe Premiere Pro on making transitions, so this is one part where you can bump up your game! The only limitation is what transitions you can think of to find. Most of my transitions come from this tutorial from Orange83.
- Add text. Again, title effect tutorials are easy to find online. You will also need to look into adding smaller, nameplate kind of texts that only take up a corner of the video, called “Lower Thirds”.
Confession: I skipped one more step I originally included in my original plan, which is colour correction.
Colour correction and colour grading is about tweaking the colours across all the clips, so it looks like one consistent colour palette with one defined look for your video as a whole. I skipped this step after a 10-minute attempt because I just couldn’t understand it then. I’ll get it in my next video edit! Jeven Dovey explains it pretty well here though.
And that’s it! Have fun for the next 10 hours cutting everything up?
What? No, this is not “Lose 5kg in 2 days” kind of article. This is more “What to direct your focus on to lose 5kg the fastest way”. You still gotta put in the work!
Conclusion
In terms of using Premiere Pro, the 80/20 applies again: Most of the time is spent using the same tools. For video/audio, it’s trimming and moving, and applying warp stabilisers for video stability. For transitions, it’s mostly key-framing. Learn these well, and the process will be accelerated many fold.
Looking at it this way, this enormous program suddenly seems pretty easy to use! Even if you are not using Premiere Pro, I’m pretty sure the core functions are the same. As with all software, learning the shortcut keys well will save you a tremendous amount of time!
Also, since this is a project of nothing-to-something, there wasn’t a perfectionist syndrome happening. I was only focused on banging out my own version 1.0 for video editing, or my “First 20 Hours of Video Making” if you will. Just to get 80% of a video done, using 20% of what normally goes into a video edit. And that was the whole point of formulating this plan!
Lastly, I think it’s most important to have fun and keep it a positive learning experience, and to keep getting inspired by beautiful cinematography. After making 1 video, I discovered a mountain of things I didn’t even know existed, such as colour grading, filters, time lapses, but I’m way more curious about them now to improve on my future videos!
All this from the breathtaking, inspiring professional grade videos.
