How to Shoot a Travel Video Top 10 Tips

Hey what's up guys now I recently just got back from some awesome trips to Thailand Japan Hawaii and posts and travel videos about each and I've been getting a lot of questions about my process for planning shooting and editing these types of travel videos so in this video I'm gonna be going over my top 10 tips to improving your travel videos but this is a loaded topic there's a lot of content to cover so this is going to be on travel videos and we'll talk more about that at the end but let's go ahead and dive into my top ten tips for better travel videos tip number one is plan ahead now I know that sounds like a no-brainer but creating a detailed itinerary is something that most people don't do very well and I'm not just talking about deciding on one activity that you're gonna do each day I mean schedule out every single hour of every single day let me give an example here's a look at one of my days I scheduled for our Thailand trip and every single day of our 15 day trip look just like that jam-packed with an hour-by-hour rundown of what I hope to accomplish that day before your trip begins go research online Google top things to do in Thailand read several articles from different people's perspectives on what the must-see attractions are and then start making a list of what you want to see check and see if they have restrictions on filming in any of those locations then schedule out the most time efficient way to see all those places in the least amount of time and put together an itinerary to do so now quick tip during this part is to contact or hire a local of that country to help you know what to see and help you get around once you're there in this case I was hired to film a wedding for a youtuber named my mate Nate that lived in Thailand so I told him that I'd filmed his wedding in exchange for an all-expense trip paid for me and my family to Thailand so Nate was a huge part and helping me decide which activities would be worth my time which ones would be tourist traps and some hidden gems that we wouldn't find on any tourist articles now we were in Thailand for about ten days and in those 10 days we took about ten different plane rides allowing us to see a wide range of attractions and we spent about 40 to 50 hours in a van ride so this is something to keep in mind if you Paul should be a great travel video is that you're actually going to be doing a lot of traveling half of your trip will be spent in some mode of transportation because the reality is not all the best attractions are central to one city they're always spread out over hundreds of miles so be prepared to jump around I also made sure to schedule the main attractions during Golden Hour because of one of the best possible lighting for the most important images now because this was doubling as a family vacation with my one-year-old daughter we had to work around her sleep schedule so we weren't able to shoot during the best light all the time but we still woke up before I am a lot of times to drive two hours to a location so we could start filming by 6:00 a.m. sunrise I will talk more about lighting just a minute but you get the point a great travel video starts with a super organized itinerary so you can capture as much content as you Boston can and this brings me to tip number two and that is content is king I talked about this a lot but once you've got a stellar plan put together and even barked on your trip now the shooting begins one of my biggest pieces of advice is to shoot a lot of content but don't just shoot to shoot more footage isn't always better unless you're getting good footage be intentional about every single shot before you roll the camera and waste harddrive space make sure that what you're capturing will add value to your story and to your edit I see too many people shooting and including clips into their edit that any random vacationer could have captured full of tourists poor lighting shaky movement overexposed bad composition be intentional with every single shot we'll talk more about storytelling later but as a rule of thumb always shoot more than you think you're gonna need because you can always edit down what you've shot but you can't go back and reshoot shots that you wished you would have shot to help fill in your gap in your edits to give you an idea of how much footage I shot on this Thailand trip I was there for 10 days shot over 13 hours of footage and my final edit was less than three minutes that's less than one percent of my footage making it into the final edit give yourself a lot of footage to work with because what that does is it makes it so that your final video is a cream of the crop the best of the best only the most stunning shots make the final edit but more footage you have to work with the more picky you can be with which shots make your final edit to make it a more engaging video for your audience this is one of the biggest problems I see in people's travel videos most people go to a destination shoe where they capture about a hundred clips and about 80 of those clips show up in their final video that's like seven minutes long so instead of picking the best of the best of their footage and presenting it in a well-crafted edit they're essentially showing you every clip they captured even the ones that are overexposed poorly frames shaky handheld stuff whatever now unless you're daily vlogger whose style it is to show every second of your day despite the quality of those Clips I recommend not showing your entire folder footage but narrowing it down to the best of the best and if you only have one minute of best clips then make a one-minute edit instead of a seven-minute edit with one minute of best clips mixed with two minutes of average clips and four minutes of below-average clips I promise you out of that 13 hours of footage I shot there's a lot of garbage a lot of clips I should never see the light of day it doesn't matter how good you are shooting you're going to end up shooting footage that isn't worth putting in your final edit so shoot a large quantity of content and then be super picky and only choose to our best clips for your final edit now this leads me into our next tip because people often ask me well how do you determine which clips are your best and which clips are average or below average and how do you make sure that while you're shooting you're shooting clips that are in the best category so let's now talk about some of my tips for capturing beautiful images that brings us to tip number three and that is composition now this is a loaded topic and I actually have a full video in the course talking about my 10 rules to composition but I want to touch on a few of those as they apply to shooting travel videos the first roll a touch on is called dominant subjects one of the biggest mistakes I see is people filming a landscape or a group of people but they don't even know what they're focusing on let alone what they want the audience to focus on what is your dominant subject of your frame and then once you've decided what the dominant subject is what's in your frame that you could eliminate that is distracting you and your audience from that dominant subject remember it's not just what's in your frame it's also about what's not on your frame so be willing to wait a few minutes for a clear shooting path without tauros or find a different angle to shoot from that will give you a better composed shot or switch out your lens to a focal length that helps you focus better on your subject people always ask me how the heck did you get that shot without any tourists in it and the answer is well I either go early in the morning when nobody else is awake or I hurry up and wait meaning I'll hurry up and get to a location and then wait sometimes for a half-hour an hour for there to be a lull and tourist traffic so that I can hurry up and grab a clean shot with nobody in it you go as fast as you can to get to the next place next location and then you just sit here and wait for tourists to clear rel1 guy laughs taking the jacket off now this sketch you see Ryan my job that's the big part of treating travel videos a lot of people would just come and get a shot with all these tourists in it and it's just not quite as magical when he got that tall guy in the black sitting there you know that's hurry-up-and-wait right there so we're way employment a few minutes probably a few more minutes before I get my one shot and we'll move on then I finally got a clean shot without tourists then I went down to a different angle and found a better spot to get a shot without any tourist signs in the frame these shots are tough because you can't look at your friend me because I'm watching my feet so I don't fall and die but you just got to kind of hope that whatever you're shooting is framed well so be willing to work hard for a clean shot that has a dominant subject without anything distracting from what you want your viewer to focus on another big part of great composition is lens choice or focal length one of the questions I get asked most is what lenses do I use on these travel videos now it can be tough to haul around a lot of gear and a lot of times you can only take one or two lenses with you so the main two lenses I bring is the Canon 16 to 35 and the Canon 24 to 70 and for a few of the extra wide shots I pulled out my 12 millimeter loyola and for shots where I couldn't get very close to my subject like with animals I pulled out my Canon 72 200 but with travel films like this my main focus is usually landscapes and people for landscapes I usually want a wide-angle to capture more of my surroundings so I'll him a lot of those shots at 16 millimeter and for people's faces it's been said that the most flattering focal length to shoot the human face is around 70 to 100 millimetre so I like to use my 24 270 for those that way I can still get pretty wide at 24 millimeter to capture those wide shots but quickly zoom in to 70 millimeter for those tight shots of faces now ideally I would be using all prime lenses but when you're shooting a wide variety of content in a limited amount of time of unpredictable subjects zoom lenses are just more practical and will allow you to capture more content at a wider variety of focal lengths for more flexibility in the editing room if I had to break down the percentage of use of each of these lenses on this tile and video I'd say that I used the 16 to 35 millimeter lens for about 40 percent of the shots the 24 to 70 for about 40 percent of the shots and the 12 millimeter for about 10 percent and the 7200 for about 10 percent and really I probably could have gotten away with just shooting the whole video with a 16 to 35 and a 24 to 70 so don't feel like you have to take a bunch of gear to capture great shots also speaking of gear I shot 95% of this video on the red weapon at 6 K for licensing reasons which I'll talk about later and about 5% of the footage I shot on the 1 DX mark 2 during times where I was afraid of the red would be water damaged or when I was doing time lapses and about 90% of this video was shot using the glide cam HD 4000 and about 10% of it was just handheld and then just throwing on some warp stabiliser in post to make those handheld shots look smoother now one more tip about great composition is to look for leading lines or symmetry or anything that creates yep as I'm walking around the location I'm scanning for anything beautiful landscapes culture people animals anything that stands out to me as something beautiful and relevant to my story and a lot of times I'll start shooting something and a few seconds in I'll realize and like as good as I thought it would and so I move on and it's important to be able to know when to stop shooting and to move on to something new because you only have so much time in the day and you have to realize that if you're spending a lot of time shooting this shot then you're foregoing other shots that could be better than the one you're shooting and this goes back to planning have a list of things you hope to shoot and look at that list and if there's something on that list scheduled that you think will be better than the content you're currently shooting then pass it up and move on to the next location before that Sun Goes Down and speaking of Sun tip number four is lighting learning how to work with natural light is a huge part of shooting travel videos because that's usually the only light you have to work with like I mentioned earlier I recommend scheduling your most epic locations around Golden Hour so you can get that Sun low in the sky giving you prettier lighting but you want to utilize every hour of the day when you're on these trips so you have to learn how to shoot in the middle of the day too for shooting in the middle of the day when lighting isn't great and the colors are bland I like to use polarizers because polarisers cut out the sun's reflection to help bring out more color and to make it feel like it was better lighting than it really was also be aware that Golden Hour doesn't always guarantee a better image it also depends on which direction your camera will be facing during that Golden Hour so sometimes if I'm able to I'll shoot the same landscape at different times of the day to give me two different looks and then I can decide in the editing room which one turned out better for example this was shot during Golden Hour but for this particular landscape shooting this particular direction it gave me a lot of unwanted shadows and morning haze so I came back and shot that same shot at noon day and everything was lit up much better and the morning haze was completely gone or going much better colors in the sky so again Golden Hour isn't always best for every scenario weather can also be a big role shooting travel videos because you're only going to be there for a few days and you may get super unlucky and go during a really stormy week Thailand for example isn't a very sunny place in general so I had to deal with a lot of cloud coverage especially during golden hours so my best direct sunlight was always coming in the middle day so I rarely had ideal lighting conditions to work with but as we talked about in the natural lighting video clouds have their advantages too they create a soft light that is better for shooting people's faces so that's why a lot of my best Thailand footage ended up being shots of people's faces because I had so much cloud coverage and if it is sunny while shooting people's faces I recommend putting the Sun behind them so they're backlit or find the shaded area so they aren't being kicked by any direct sunlight so again learning how to utilize natural light will help your images look a lot more cinematic and professional but even if you do shoot and great lighting if you don't have your exposure set right or your color balances off then it can make that great lighting look bad which brings me to tip number five and that is camera settings another big mistake I see in people's videos in general and especially in travel videos that makes their videos look amateur is their images are overexposed or have poor color balance learning how to dial in your camera settings is a huge part of creating cinematic professional-looking images now as far as the settings that I use for this Thailand video most everything was shot at 60 frames per second at 6k resolution on the red weapon and then I slowed down that footage to 24 frames per second in post giving it that dreamy slow-mo look that I often like using for these types of videos and because the red shoots raw it doesn't really matter what I set my color temperature to because I can change that in post but I still try and get my color temperature set as accurately as possible in camera but especially if you're working with a non raw DSLR camera you have to make sure you get that color temperature dialed in before you shoot now when shooting in direct sunlight I'll usually be at around 5600 Kelvin because that's about where the temperature of the Sun sits during the middle of day and as that Sun gets lower in the sky or you get some cloud coverage that temperature will change a little bit so you have to learn how to adjust it throughout the day and again I talked more in depth about color temperature in the full course but point is pay attention to your colors and check before each shot to make sure your image doesn't look too warm or too cool and make any necessary adjustments now even if you aren't shooting raw you can still adjust your color balance in post to a certain degree but what you can't fix in post is recovering blown out highlights and again I see this all the time in DSLR footage usually the cheaper your camera is the worse the dynamic range is going to be dynamic range meaning that can ability to capture both highlights and shadows and I found that it's a lot easier to recover crushed shadow details than it is to recover blown out highlight detail so if you're trying to decide what exposure to shoot at and you're not sure exactly how bright your image needs to be I would recommend airing on the dark side and pulling the shadows up and post instead of airing on the bright side and having to bring the highlights down because it's a lot harder to recover those blown out highlights now obviously if you're shooting directly into the Sun the Sun is going to be blown out and that's okay but generally speaking try and keep all of your information in the middle of this histogram and that will ensure a correct exposure other camera settings to be aware of I like to keep my aperture high around 8 to 22 when I'm shooting landscapes and I keep it low around 2.8 when I'm shooting tighter shots like people's faces so I can get that nice shallow depth of field with the shutter speed it depends on what my aperture is at and what my lighting is like but generally I try and keep my shutter speed double my frame rate but sometimes I'm okay bumping it up a little moving on to tip number six is movements now this refers to both camera movement and on camera subject movement now you guys know that I personally love incorporating movement into my videos because movement creates energy energy creates emotion and as will touch down and tip number eight creating emotion is the number one goal of storytelling and sorry folks but that's it for part number one to see part two covering movement working with on camera subjects storytelling and how to get paid to travel along with part three giving you an in-depth look at my editing process for this video if you can join us at full-time filmmaker comm or if you're not ready to during the full program I've been getting a lot of you requesting the ability to just by a few select videos so I've created a mini course focusing just on creating travel videos that includes all three parts of this how to shoot a travel video series plus I'll be throwing in a few bonuses I'll be providing my full Thailand trip itinerary so you can get an in-depth look at how I plan these trips my Hyundai Kona Hawaii edit in-depth breakdown showing you how I pieces that edit together and I'm also including my color grading process for my Fukuoka Japan red weapon video and I'll be including a raw 6k red file for you to practice color grading with and I'm giving you access to my kawaii footage along with my Premiere Pro project file on that edit so you can dissect all the effects