Traveling is fun and exciting, and many people love turning their journeys into travel videos. No matter if you create travel videos for YouTube, Instagram, or just your personal archive, there are some things that make them amateurish and uninteresting. Sometimes, no matter how good the shots are, or how great was the place you visited, there’s simply something missing. In this video, Thomas Alex Norman discusses three reasons why your travel videos are not as good as you’d like. And when you improve on these three aspects, you’ll raise their quality to a much higher level.
1. Lack of context
When shooting a travel video, it shouldn’t be just a series of random sequences, no matter how beautiful they look. You should answer the question why: why is something happening? Why do you like it or dislike it?
In vlogging, it’s pretty straightforward to share this information: you can literally say it and be quite obvious. In travel videos, there are several other ways to express it. It can be a voiceover, which is probably the simplest. You can use short titles, or share the experience and convey your message through the visual story, which is the most difficult, but certainly possible.
2. Lack of proper composition
This is not about whether you’re using any of the composition rules or not. It’s rather about whether the composition is well thought-through and suits the story you’re trying to tell. In short, you should work on improving the overall quality of your shots: from the steadiness and the quality of the movement to paying attention to photography rules (and using them wisely). This way your complete footage will be better. Consequently, you’ll have more material to choose from for the final edit, and your videos will become more professional-looking.
3. Lack of emotion
When you travel, you feel certain emotions in the places you visit. You can feel happy, awe-inspired, shocked, or even shaken or sad. Well, the point of your travel video is to make the viewer feel these emotions, too. Without the emotions, your video is just a string of pretty pictures. It’s not bad, but it can be so much better.
There’s no set way of capturing it and sharing it with your audience, it’s up to you how you’ll do it. But, think about how you feel while shooting, and have in mind that you should transfer those emotions to your viewers. And when you’re editing, choose music wisely, because it can add so much to the story and the emotions you’re trying to share.
The next time you shoot travel videos, think about these three things. Even if your videos are decent now, they will become so much better if you focus more on the context, quality, and emotions.
[Why Your Travel Videos SUCK | Thomas Alex Norman]
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