Some Good Tips for Making Great Travel Videos

Snore....

Last week I was pawing through some old photographs my dad had taken in 1967 during a family trip to Europe.

In those days, he shot on 35mm Kodachrome slides, so between the cost of the film, the cost of the processing and the fact that my old man could squeeze Lincoln off a penny, there were not that many slides to look at.

The vast majority of them were of buildings or monuments. I am sure when my dad first laid eyes on the Eiffel Tower or The Vatican, he was compelled to stand and take a photo of the building. But thirty odd years later, there photographs have no appeal to me what so ever.  What does capture my attention is the photos of the people - my family, who were there. 

That is what you spend hours looking at years later.  The buildings... feh! Who cares.

This weekend we are down at The Travel Channel Academy in Chevy Chase, training yet another crop of prospective travel journalists for the channel.  

The lesson of my dad's Kodachromes is the lesson I am imparting to our prospective TJs.

Don't shoot buildings. Or monuments.  

No one cares.

And certainly no one is going to pay you for yet another shot of the Eiffel Tower, no matter how well lit it may be. 

What makes compelling video is stories about people.  

Particularly people you know, but certainly people you care about.

If you are making home videos (as opposed to trying to sell the to the Travel Channel), then concentrate on people.

And stories.

How many times have I seen people on vacation holding their video cameras and panning across endless expanses of the Agora in Athens or The Grand Canal in Venice.  

Blegh!

Better to point the camera at your wife or your kids and let them talk.

What's going on? What did we do today?

Even better, build a little story. "Today we're going to see The Great Pyramid at Cheops".

And then shoot the story.  

At the end of the day, it's all about characters. 

And arc of story.

Famous buildings and monuments? Who cares.

I flip through the old Kodachromes and come across a shot of my sister at the age of 10.

Hard to believe.

And a whole lot more interesting than yet another exterior of The Vatican (where she threw up in the Sistine Chapel).