How to Make Travel Videos for Beginners

Shooting travel videos is not only about the fun of using your camera or capturing incredible moments. You also want people to watch and like it because that tells you that you've created a good piece of art. Of course that's hard to achieve especially in the beginning which is why I created this tutorial. With this tutorial I want to make it easy for you to produce travel videos that people want to watch. I will share all the necessary steps together with my best tips here so by the end of this tutorial you will feel a lot more confident to shoot your next travel videos. Let's start with the first and the crucial step the preparation. The first thing you want to find out is what's the point of your travel video. Do you want to educate people about a certain place? Do you want to show the experience? Do you want to tell an actual story? Or do you just want to let people have a feeling like inspiration or the need for adventure? The point of your video can be everything you can imagine but if it has no point there's also no point for the viewer to watch it. And then it's also important to leave some space for unforeseeable things because of course you can't plan every single detail of your trip and it's actually a good thing because things that just happen and that you cannot plan that are all of your control can make your travel video unique and separated from other travel videos that cover the same topic. Another important part of the preparation is to inform yourself about the place where you want to go. For that tools like google maps, instagram and youtube are perfect. You already get an impression of good shots and the overall experience and you will also be able to check if there is something else on the way to cover in your video. What you should also plan before is the time of the day. Most of the time your shots will look better if you go for sunrise and sunset but there are sometimes places where it's better to go at noontime. For example waterfalls often lie in between mountains so the sun must be up to light up the waterfall. Here you definitely get better shots at noontime instead of sunset or sunrise but it really depends on the place. So definitely take some time for preparation before shooting the actual video because that makes it a lot easier for you to capture the right shots that keep the viewer engaged and therefore make your video a lot better. But i would say it's time now to go shooting and give you some tips about that. Our next step is to shoot the video. Now there's a lot you can learn about shooting videos which is why you should subscribe to my channel by the way. But in this video i want to give you the tips that i think make the biggest difference when comparing travel videos from beginners with professional travel videos. The first tip for shooting travel videos is one i can't mention enough and it's likely the most important tip to make the step from beginner to pro. So the tip is simply to capture single shots instead of keeping the camera rolling all the time what i'm doing in the shot right now. And as you can see the footage comes out pretty bad. So instead of shooting continuously better get single shots. By doing so you force yourself to shoot more intentionally what makes your shots come out a lot better. I think you can tell a huge difference in the shots that you see here right now and this is just me shooting without planning any shots and instead just looking for a few good ones. But there's also another advantage of getting short single shots instead of shooting continuously. It simply saves you a lot of time in the edit as you don't have to skip through hours of footage. So definitely shoot like that instead of keeping your camera rolling all the time. But now you likely ask yourself what shots you should get and why should you get them. And this actually not that complicated. You just have to start thinking in terms of scenes of your travel video and then you can kind of guess what shots you need to get to create each scene. For example the first scene could be traveling in a van, second scene could be walking or hiking to the destination, third scene arriving at the destination and enjoying the view, fourth scene having some food at a restaurant, fifth scene sunset beach time. So the standard travel video would be something like that. And so now during your trip you can simply ask yourself what scene you're in right now and what shots you need to get to create the scene. In the van that could mostly be some parts where people do funny stuff or everyone sleeps hangover from the last night. But at the other scenes it gets more complicated. In the hiking to your destination scene for example you want to capture a sequence of shots that tell the story of the hike. So here you can shoot a mix of close-up shots of people's walking feet, faces looking at what's around them, wide-angle shots of people hiking and shots of interesting things you see on the way or unforeseen stuff that happens during the hike. Important to remember is that close-up medium and wide-angle shots show more or less of the same situation. A close-up shot of a foot can show that it's about hiking but it leaves questions on who is hiking and where and what does he or she see. So by using close-up shots first and wide-angle shots later you keep the viewer interested as he wants to know more. Whereas with shots that should show what people see on the way you have lots of creative freedom. Just show whatever looks good for that. So generally by capturing a good variety of different shots that show everything from different perspectives you make it very easy for you to put together some good scenes and overall a good travel video later on your computer. So definitely get more shots than you think you need. It's definitely better to have more than not enough but also make sure that you definitely get all the key shots that you need for each scene or each place to really tell the story or at least show the essence of a place. But now let's get even deeper into it by giving you some tips on how to make your shots actually look good. And a good one here is to place subjects like people, cars and other objects we see often in wide-angle shots. The reason for that is simply that by doing so our brains have a reference point for the size of the landscape and objects in the shot. What makes the landscape or attraction in the shot appear even bigger. Another tip that beginners mostly do wrong is to point the camera down from the top. Your footage looks much better if you either get bottom-up shots or if you keep your camera on the height of your subject instead of pointing the camera down while you're standing. The reason is simply that you make things look small by pointing your camera down on them while shooting up from the bottom makes it look bigger and at the same height it looks even. Most of the time you want to make things look big or even and not smaller and as most beginners just shoot while standing instead of kneeling down your videos automatically look amateurish if you shoot like that. So move your body, get low and your shots will look much better and more interesting. You can also make your shots more interesting by moving your camera. That mustn't be big movements though. You can simply use a foreground object directly in front of your camera to make even small camera movements more visible. To make the motion even more visible you can use a wide-angle lens for forward and backward moving shots and a more zoomed-in lens for movements in the horizontal and vertical axis. If your camera doesn't have digital or sensor stabilization you should get a gimbal though as otherwise your footage will look shaky. Also optically stabilized lenses and slow motion help with that. And regarding slow motion I want to add here that you should only use slow motion to emphasize certain shots instead of using it everywhere because if you use it in every shot then the effect of slow motion gets lost a bit so it's not that strong anymore if you want to use it for shots where it actually does something like emphasizing certain emotions or so. Now there is a problem though and that is that oftentimes when I shoot my videos I don't really know if I want to slow a shot down or not later in post and that's why usually I get all my shots in 60 frames per second as long as I don't know for sure that I will not slow it down and that makes it easy for me then later in post to decide if I ever want to create a slow motion effect or if I leave it at normal speed. Then you might also ask about seamless transitions. Now there's a lot you can do to make transitions and I can't cover all of that in this video but what is generally very easy to do for cool transitions is to end one shot in the same way as another one starts. So for example if you slide your camera behind a tree at the end of one shot you can get a second shot where you start behind a tree and then slide the camera away from it to reveal something around you. In the edit you can simply cut these shots at the right moment at a fade effect and you have a super smooth transition. I made another video about it you will find a link to that in the description below. And when it comes to transitions it's also important to talk about how to transition from one shot or one place to the next one because if you only make a normal cut there it oftentimes feels a bit weird it comes too sudden. So what you can do there you basically have three options and the first one is to simply insert some drone shots, second option is to use time lapses and the third option is quite interesting that is to capture things that are the same in both places or both scenes and bring them together later in the edit. The first two ones are quite obvious. Drone shots from high up in the air are great to transition from one scene to the other as it takes the viewer away from the current scene. Time lapses are great as it feels like time is passing by until something else happens. But the third option is actually often overlooked. To do that you must imagine what objects are the same in different parts or scenes of your travel video. So what you do is to simply get one shot of something like that at the first place and then another one at the second place. By simply cutting these shots together at the transition between two scenes it feels like the scenes have a connection. So it doesn't feel like a random jump cut anymore. So these were some of the most important tips when it comes to shooting your travel videos but now it's time for the next step the video editing part and this is where all the magic happens. So the first step that you should do when you edit your travel video is to throw all the footage in your timeline and then build a good structure of your travel video by bringing clips together that generate scenes as we talked about earlier. And after that everything you really have to do is to arrange the clips within each scene in a way that either tells the story of each scene or that at least has a good flow. And flow good can mean that you put them together in a way that tells the story and keeps the viewer interested. But it can also mean that you arrange them by similarities like camera motion, similar forms, same subjects and so on. But depending on the video you want to shoot it can also make sense to work with voiceovers like I do here in this tutorial mostly and then you simply adjust your clips to the voiceover so that the clips always reflect what you're talking about. Of course if you can combine that with sequences then you're absolutely killing it. This is what Jake Frew for example does a lot in his videos. I really love that. And let me also show you how to edit the transition we talked about earlier. As mentioned you simply cut the first clip at the end where it's similar to the start of the second clip and then you do the same thing at the beginning of the second clip. Now you only need to insert a simple crossfade transition and it looks pretty seamless. You will find more tutorials about transitions on my channel but definitely don't overuse them as they can also make your travel videos look cheap if used wrong or too much. Okay these are only the basics when it comes to editing good travel videos. Of course there's a lot more that you can learn about it. But I must say that these basics are actually the most important points because a good travel video is not just made of fancy transitions and orange and color grading etc even if I like that as well. But a good travel video in the first place has either a strong point or it tells a good story or it simply delivers the feeling of a place pretty well. And fancy transitions and color grading etc is really more on top of that instead of being in the first place even if that's what you probably notice a bit more in the travel videos. And the good thing is as well that you can implement these tips that I gave you with every major video editor. Like even windows movie maker would work for that because it doesn't require any fancy transitions or so on. So if you put all the tips from this video into practice I'm absolutely sure that your travel videos will turn out much better and that even people that don't know you will enjoy watching them. Most important is really to ask yourself what the value of your video will be for the viewer. And if you're not in a level where you can impress with cinematics go more into storytelling while you learn how to improve the visual quality of your footage. Okay thanks for watching. I put a lot of effort into this video as you can tell. So please if you enjoyed it leave me a thumbs up and also subscribe. It really helps the channel grow. And also feel free to share the video with others to help them create better travel videos. Maybe you know someone that's interested in that as well. And I would say that's it here. I'm out and I hope to see you in the next video. If you just want to make which is act which is not too loud. That sucks when you shoot at the road. Oh please. We need more electric cars. Now I see the advantage. So definitely take some time for the. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Oh yeah. Yeah. Come. I need 100 cars more. So definite motorbike.