Basic Training: Super Vacation Videos

Kyle Cassidy
June 2007

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Uncle Larry's vacation videos were a lot like Andy Warhol movies. His worst was London: 1999, which was about nine hours of footage of buildings. You could watch the hands of Big Ben twirl around for twenty minutes before the camera cut to the gate of some cemetery they couldn't get into, and then you could hear Aunt Martha exclaim: "Quickly, Larry! It's one of those double-decker buses!" and the camera would twirl around and zoom in and out a couple of times before focusing on the back end of a bus lurching around a corner, wherein Aunt Martha would cut in: "Rewind it, Larry. They hardly got to see the bus!"

The art of creating videos that other people can watch is largely the art of realizing your audience. If you're making the video for relatives, you can include more shots of the kids being cute than if you're planning to show it to your office mates or enter it in contests.

Plan your shots like you plan your vacation. Having a list ahead of time will help you make sure that you don't miss important things along the way. Here are some things you might want to consider:

• An introduction - Have someone tell where you are, when you went, why you went.
• Where you stayed - You might not think of it at the time, but ten years later you're going to wish you had some video of the houseboat you stayed in while in Amsterdam and the neighborhood around it.
• A conclusion - Have someone tell what they saw, what they liked, what they didn't like.
• A storyline - Is this the story of your family going on vacation? Or is it the story of the kids making a discovery about themselves? Start with your vacation expectations, go to your experiences and then conclude with how you've changed.

Do your research before you leave home. Don't go on vacation blind - knowing something about the place you're visiting and its history will make the trip easier. Figuring out where you want to go beforehand will save precious time on the ground. You'll also want to check to see if the places you'll be visiting allow videotaping; some museums and nightclubs don't. It's always wise to check.

When Shane Carruth made his celebrated 2004 indie feature Primer, he shot it at a ratio of almost 1:1 - using all but six minutes of the total footage he shot. This caused a lot of jaws to drop.

"A typical ratio for student films and very-low-budget productions is about 10:1," says Michael Chaskes, a Hollywood film editor whose credits include Crisis in the Kremlin and God's Army. "Hollywood films typically run 20:1 or more." But he wouldn't expect you to have anything like that to produce a nice, quality vacation video.

For a polished and "ambitious" vacation video, Chaskes says, "a minimum of 2:1 is called for, with probably a maximum of 4 or 5:1. If you're going for a truly professional look, between 5 and 10:1. In either of these cases, though, one would need to be shooting a wide variety of angles and coverage; 5 minutes of random, unplanned or repetitive footage will not necessarily yield one good minute of edited video."

Tape is cheap, so capture a lot, but cut out most of it. Of course, never throw out your raw footage - you'll enjoy watching it yourself years later.

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