As an avid traveler, I have a list of the places I want, need, have to go to, taped next to my computer. While this list is a source of inspiration, it also prevents me from visiting the same place twice, no matter how much I loved it. There is just not enough vacation time or money, sadly, to visit the places I know I love AND visit the new destinations.
Of course there are a couple of exceptions, one notable is Sanibel Island located off of the coast of Florida. In the past four years, I have visited three times, courtesy of my family’s timeshare. The terrific thing about visiting the same place multiple times is that it takes the pressure off of doing and seeing everything in one trip. I know that if I don’t get to kayak, or eat dinner at the Mucky Duck, or squeeze in an afternoon at the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge, that I can always make time for those activities next year.
Likewise, this gives me some breathing room creativity-wise. I have photographed a lot of the wildlife and scenery on the island and while each year offers up new photographic opportunities, this year I wanted to try the 1 second everyday video app instead of relying solely on photos to remember my trip. (If you are not familiar with 1 second everyday video app, you can read more about it here) Don’t get me wrong, I still took plenty of photos, but I wanted to stretch a little bit and try something new.
I’m glad I did, because I thought it would be easy, a notion quickly disproved. I planned some shots out ahead of time, but I quickly realized they wouldn’t work. For example, it’s hard to read phrases in one second, so some of the signs I videoed wouldn’t work at all. On day one, after reviewing the videos I shot, I thought most of them were boring or sloppy and/or unusable.
But I wasn’t discouraged, on the contrary, I felt motivated to make something better. So I started paying more attention to the motion of my subject and/or the motion of my camera, if it was too fast or too slow, they wouldn’t work as a one second video. I also decided to try and simplify my videos so that they were easy to visually comprehend in a second: a spinning fan under the cabana, a beer can being cracked open on the porch, a ticking watch in the airport.
I also tried different angles for more interesting perspectives, and God help me, I even considered buying a selfie stick so that I could create a smoother approach/zoom on subjects and create more interesting angles.
And lastly, I spent a ridiculous amount of time arranging the sequence of the shots in my timeline. You can tell different stories or create different moods by the very order of the videos themselves, which would be a fun experiment to try some time: rearranging the same videos in a different order or pattern to see if it changes the mood of the video. Maybe in my next blog.
In short, I had a lot of fun with the project. It’s not perfect, but it was a good jumping-off point for me. There will be more vacations that will serve as excellent case studies for me as I continue to experiment and grow my video skills and of course there will always be Sanibel next year.
Note: I started off using I second video, but I was really irritated by the fact that I couldn’t remove the timestamp from my videos in the app. I ended up downloading Final Cut Pro (You can download a trial version here) and placing my clips in the timeline. I also made them a little longer by a second or two in some cases because, hey, it’s my video and I’ll make them longer if I want to.
