While this is not a video that we would normally give our stamp of approval, it was something we were able to resurrect from the cutting room floor. In creating it, I was really just practicing to get my moves down with the whole travel vlog creation process, and in so doing I decided it’s passable so we’re throwing out there on YouTube just for fun.
So it may be obvious we need practice with vlogging. Good news is we learned a lot from this and our next one should show improvement. (And just between you and me, we’ve shot a lot of “day in the life” kind of video like this, but it’s always been worse, and so never materialized into a finished piece. Having this one on YouTube is a big step in the right direction.)
Some key things we learned were – we need more transitions, or explanation of transitions from one activity to the next, or one time frame to the next. For example, visiting with Les, and then BANG we’re out having dinner. I cheated on this one and put in the text between some of them, but in the future we’ll walk the viewer through it with more video clips.
And to help with that, we’ll be working on a rough cut immediately after shooting, or at least every evening instead of waiting until we’re home to piece it together. You can’t tell from this video, but we were 2 nights in Anacortes and 3 nights in Walla Walla on this trip. So a rough cut every evening would have shown us any big gaps when we still had opportunity to deal with them.
Also, we never really introduced Shannon’s dad in the video, or did any explanation of his situation. Les suffered from a massive stroke about 15 years ago which left him unable to move his entire left side. For quite a long time after that, he was able to hobble around with a cane and he even drove his car for another 10 years or so. But in the last 5 years his mobility has really declined and he’s now been bed ridden for over a year.
We try to visit him every 2 or 3 months and so that’s what this road trip was all about. But this was the first time we did so with our van, and we saved a lot of money on accommodations. Because we are wanting to build a YouTube channel, this was an opportunity to get some practice vlogging.