People and Video

Get your people in your videos.  There is no simpler piece of advice I can give to new videographers than that.

Every person that owns a video camera of some kind has been guilty of it.  We get to an exciting location and we spend hours of recording time trying to document the sights and sounds of the location as if we are the first people ever to stumble upon this odd and strange land.

However, once we get back home and start editing our recordings together we quickly become disappointed that we didn’t capture more of the special moments that we experienced with our loved ones while on location.

What happened to the people?

I watched this happen just last weekend.  A nice family was riding in front of my family obviously taking in their first trip on Disney’s “It’s A Small World” ride.  The dolls were spinning, the music was repeating, and there was Dad recording every moment of the ride on his mini-video camera.  Every moment except the look of joy on his young son’s face.

Dad was making the classic mistake of recording the event without recording what made it special.

I myself remember a trip my family took to Yellowstone National Park in 1987.  My father had bought a huge beast of a VHS camcorder just for the trip.  He spent the better part of the two weeks we were traveling with his eye pressed against the viewfinder burning through hours of tape.  We still joke to this day that Dad spent the entire vacation seeing the wonders of Yellowstone through a 1-inch black and white viewfinder.  Even he admitted to being surprised by some of the colors one he viewed his product back home.

As the resident geek I edited down the 8 hours of video into a tight little 2 hour documentary for captured friends and family.  Once finished we realize just how little Dad actually appeared in the video.  In fact, the whole family was missing from the bulk of the video as well.

There was plenty of beautiful video of waterfalls, animals, sunrises, mountains, and the like, but where were the people enjoying the moment?  Where were the personal memories?  We had made a PBS travel video not a family vacation video.

I’m as guilty as anyone.  In February I went to the Daytona 500 with my lovely wife and she appears in exactly zero of the 45 minutes of video that I shot throughout the day.  I have tons of footage of cars, the garage area, and the track itself.  I actually have more footage of Tom Cruise than my lovely wife.  Where is the footage of the person I hold dear that made the day truly special?  Where is our personal story?

Stop trying to shoot the next promotional video for your location.  The odds are unless you are truly in some sort of strange and unique place there is already plenty of imagery available to remind you of the place you’re visiting.  What makes that place special to you, or at least what should be a big part of what makes that place special to you, is who was there with you when you experienced it yourself.

Let the video roll.  Just make sure that you include your unique experience in your videos, especially if you are looking to share your creation with the world.  I’ve likely already seen where you are.  I want to see how much you enjoyed being where you were and the people you shared it with.
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Article image provided by truello
Cover image provided by GraceFamily