10 Tips For Shooting Great Videos While Travelling With Your Children
The best way of preserving the highlights of a family trip is to film videos which will convey living scenes and will take you back in time to experience the same joy months and years later. Besides, the very process of making travel videos can be fun and unifying for the family, if you get everyone involved. Here are some tips to help you make travel videos with your children that you’ll be proud to share with grandparents and friends. Let’s get started!
- Focus on people
It’s important to film beautiful landscapes and famous monuments, but when you’re travelling with your family, what matters most is how they experience the key moments of the trip. Their actions, reactions and emotions – that’s where you need to focus. You can start the shoot by introducing the setting and then move straight on to the action: capture your son snorkelling, your daughter picking seashells, the whole family riding quad bikes, and so on.
- Get everyone involved
Don’t hesitate to hand the camera over to the kids from time to time to get their take on your travel experiences. As a bonus, you’ll get a chance to be present in your travel videos, too. Also, you’ll make your children feel more involved and enthusiastic about travelling and film making.
You could even create a whole family travel film project by dividing up the roles – writer, director, actors, cameraman, assistant, etc. The roles can be combined, of course. Different genres are possible: reportage, interview, documentary, music video. The only limit is your imagination. This way, you can not only make awesome videos, but also introduce your children to video production in a fun way and just have a laugh together. But whatever you do, don’t forget to take precautions to protect your video equipment.
- Let your children behave naturally
Children should remain children. Don’t force them to stand up straight and talk about how they feel about the place they’re in or the experiences they’re having. Capture moments of fun, let them run around, play, express their emotions spontaneously, do the same things they normally do, but in an extraordinary setting.
- Stay at children’s eye level
One of the most common but often overlooked tips for filming children is to stay level with their heads. Even if you have to bend down, crouch down or lie down to do this, it’s worth it, as you’ll get more natural and captivating footage this way.
- Shoot as much as you can
You’ll naturally want to capture visits to monuments, encounters with local wildlife, tasting fruit or exotic dishes, horse or elephant rides and other sporting or cultural activities. But don’t neglect the travel stages either, especially if your child is taking the plane or train for the first time, as well as the moments that may seem mundane: breakfast at the hotel, swimming in the pool, and so on. Later, you’ll appreciate them as you relive your journey in all its fullness. Finally, you’d better delete the footage you don’t need than regret the videos you didn’t take.
- Choose the best time for shooting
I can tell from my own experience and from that of my travelling friends that it is always wise to program activities which require concentration, like a visit to a museum, in the morning, reserving the afternoon for kids entertainment. The same principle can be applied to shooting family travel videos: try to shoot the maximum in the morning or right from the start of an activity or adventure, when the children are well rested and motivated.
- Prefer horizontal videos
Let’s move on to the technical tips. The first is to shoot your videos horizontally. If you don’t, you’ll get black bands when you watch your videos on a computer screen or television.
- Mind the audio
The lapping of waves, the singing of exotic birds or that of street musicians, the words of passers-by in their native language and of course the happy laughter of your kids – all these are valuable in creating the setting for your travel film. To transmit authentic sounds, and especially to record interviews with members of your family, consider using the external microphone.
- Avoid long narration
When filming, you might be tempted to explain what’s going on in great detail, but it’s best to refrain from doing so, because afterwards you might find your words inappropriate, badly structured or simply inaudible, and to get rid of them you’ll have to replace the whole audio track. Instead, limit yourself to a short introduction or a few comments here and there, and if you absolutely must add a voice-over, you can do it in post-production.
- Hold the camera still
It’s normal to want to follow the children’s movements and capture them from every angle, but doing so can result in a jerky video that will make viewers nauseous. It’s best to get the frame right from the start and let the action unfold in front of your lens. If you have to move, do it slowly.
Anyway, you are unlikely to avoid shaky footage completely, especially if you give the camera to your kids. Luckily, this problem is easy to correct in post-production. Follow the link below to find a step-by-step guide on how to stabilize a video with Clipify – it’s a powerful yet easy-to-use video editing program which can help you assemble, cut and enhance your family travel videos in many ways. For example, you can spice up your travel movies with cinematic titles and transitions, stylish captions, cliparts and filters, add music and voice over, change the speed of some sequences for greater dynamism, zoom on some crucial scenes and save your videos in a wide range of formats to share it easily with grandparents or friends.
So, the next time you travel with your family, don’t forget to take your phone or camera, enough memory cards and a portable charger. Remember our advice and film a video story of your trip to remember it forever.
