Shooting the Journey: A Guide to Vacation Video

Traveling for pleasure ought to be an ideal subject for video: exotic locales, colorful people, exciting events, spectacular scenery--how can you lose? So you videotape with abandon, haul 40 hours of footage homeward, and spend days carving it into a carefully assembled program. The result? First we went here and then we went there and then we went to the next place....

Despite all your hard and intelligent effort, the finished program holds your audience for maybe ten minutes, tops, before they start glazing over. How come? Some people make travelogues so good that folks pay to get in and then spend two happy hours watching them. Why can't you?

You can, of course, by working the way the pros do. And that's what we're here to discuss. So let's take a look at the techniques you need to turn various kinds of trips into successful videos.

But before getting into the specifics of touring or RV-cruising or backpacking, we need to cover the fundamentals of all travel videomaking, the things that help ensure successful programs, regardless of where you go or how you get there.

Like every other video project, a travel program involves preproduction, production, and post production. The pre-production phase is critical because after you leave home you often can't compensate for things you forgot to do. So one key to a successful travel video is planning and preparation.

Start by researching your destination(s) and discovering what'll be worth taping when you arrive there. A surprising number of trippers omit this common-sense procedure. That might be okay if you're going to spend a month in London, for example, but if your guided tour has allotted you two free days there, you'd better arrive knowing what you want to shoot and where to find it.

Anticipating your subject matter will also help you choose equipment for your journey. Going to a national park full of wildlife? Be sure to pack a telephoto lens extender and a tripod. Cruising the San Juan Islands in a 32-foot trawler? Better have a polarizer for all those sky-and- water shots.

In fact, putting your equipment kit together is the other half of video trip preparation, and the safe rule here is, pack as if you will find no video supplies on your trip. Sure, if you shoot full- size VHS and your destination's New York, you don't have to buy all your blank tapes at home. But in general, things in Mombassa, Madrid, and Mount Rushmore cost more than they do at home--if they're available at all. (Try finding S-VHS compact cassettes in some places!) For a quick rundown of equipment you should consider packing, see the sidebar, "Video Equipment for Traveling."

The production phase of your travel video is of course the trip itself, and you'll stay on the path to success here if you follow three guidelines: find an organizer, work like the pros, and shoot to edit.

Find an organizer. In every video genre, including travel, the difference between a program and mere footage is that the program is about something. To be effective, each sequence needs a simple idea to organize it and give it a point. It doesn't have to be original or profound.

On a visit to Venice, for instance, your organizer might be pigeons, of which there are gazillions. Pigeons rising in flustered clouds from the Piazza San Marco, pigeons perched on every roof, cornice, ledge, and piling. Pigeon decorations on every statue.

Or how about modern traffic on ancient waters as your organizing theme? The vaporetto boats that provide rapid transit, the red Coca Cola delivery barge chugging past, the off-duty gondolier listening to a boom box in his 18th century boat, the auto traffic signs like senso unico ("one way") adapted for water traffic.

In these examples, the true subject isn't pigeons or aquatic adaptations but glorious Venice itself. You can use these simple topics to give coherence to what might otherwise be just a scenic grab-bag of disconnected shots.

Work like the pros. Regardless of content, a program can never be better than its individual shots, so here's a reminder about several camcorder basics.

First, watch those "automatic" features. Make sure the white balance is correct for the light. Disable the autofocus and (if possible) the exposure control in situations where they tend to get confused. (Then remember to re-enable them before resuming quick-and-dirty shooting.)

Next, get a variety of angles. An entire program shot from standing shoulder height gets tedious mighty quick. In choosing camera heights and angles, look for compositions and always shoot to enhance the feeling of depth. Tape buildings from their corners to create strong diagonals and frame distant prospects with foreground objects like windows, trees or arches.

Avoid zooming. It burns up battery power and on-screen it's a waste of time that you should edit out. Also, avoid firehosing and snapshooting. Firehosing means sweeping your camcorder all over a scene without remaining on anything long enough to really look at it. Snapshooting is taping in two- or three-second bursts as if you were taking still pictures. The results are very tiring to watch.

Notice that most of these suggestions have consequences for editing, and indeed, the third important guideline is...

Shoot to edit. Perhaps you can edit some subjects in the camera, but trips are simply too long to yield good programs without later pruning and organizing. So as you shoot, remember that what you're capturing is not the program but the raw materials for it. With that in mind,

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