The human mind is curious and loves to explore new places. Despite all the challenges of traveling, most tourists feel that the experience of being in a new place compensates for the hurdles. By the end of the trip, they often get emotional with all the beautiful experiences. At such times, it is understandable that the traveler would want to share their experience as travel videos.
Also, the demands of modern life do not permit most people to travel as much as they would like to. For such people, travel videos are a solace to learn about new places and explore them virtually.
As a content creator, you should be ready to put in extra effort and ensure a seamless viewing experience for your viewers. In this article, we will discuss some tips that will help make your travel videos more interesting.
Be Clear on Your Theme
You will have hundreds of stories that you associate with a vacation. Post the trip, you will want to share these stories with your audience. Do not be tempted to summarise the trip in one video and show everything that you enjoyed. This will make the video unnecessarily long and may cause your viewers to lose interest in the story.
Ideally, you should pick one topic and commit to it for the videos. For example, you can create a video to talk about your experience with the lemurs of Madagascar instead of one where you describe your 15-day trip to East Africa.
Understand Your Viewer Expectations
While your travel video should tell your story, you cannot afford to ignore your viewer experience. For example, a younger audience will prefer videos of you partying in Bangkok while a more mature demographics would want to learn about the local cuisine and culture.
For professional video making, try to create a viewer persona to understand the expectations of your target audience. That way, you can plan the theme, tone, and music of your travel videos.
Be Authentic in Your Videos
A look at some of the most popular travel video channels will reveal that all of them are authentic in their travel stories. As a traveler, you need to accept the uncertainty of this field. For example, you may not spot a tiger in Sundarbans despite choosing to go there at the best time of the year.
Heavy rains may prevent you from completing the trek you had always dreamt of. While creating your videos, try to be real and talk about these experiences as well. Pretending to have completed the trek or having spotted a tiger will lead to no good. Your viewers will see through your lies and question your integrity.
Create a Story Board
The travel video clips are precious to you because of the memories that they carry. As a content creator, you need to realize that your viewers will not have the same emotions as the clips. To ensure that they enjoy the video even, you need to plan a story.
Create a storyboard so that your video has a defined beginning, middle, and conclusion. While filming, try to capture ample B-roll footages to help in the story designing. A well-designed story helps to hold the viewer engrossed in the content and reduces drop-offs.
Work on Fixed Camera Settings
Irrespective of the filming device that you use, we suggest that you spend some time on the tool to understand the best settings. Then, set that as the default settings for the trip.
When you make alterations to the camera setting during the trip it causes you to compromise with the overall image quality. Even with the best editing tools, this is something that cannot be fixed in the post-production stage.
Color Correct the Clips
During your travels, it may not be feasible to film under consistently lighting. Under such situations, we suggest that you color correct the clips to adjust the lighting imbalance. Most online video editor tools allow you to adjust the white balance and color correct the clips.
Make sure that you do justice to this step before you get to trimming, merging, or duplicating the clips.
Plan Your Transitions
Typically, your travel videos will not be longer than 5 seconds. While the use of transitions is acceptable, you need to plan your footages. Haphazard footages joined into 5-second clips will create a nightmare of jump cuts and give a headache to the viewer.
Ideally, your video planning should aim at the beginning and ending the videos with a visual cue. The slow spinning of the frame, high fiving to the camera, slow panning of the camera are some effective ways of creating your signature transitions.
Decide on The Audio Recording Device
There may be situations where you need to film your travel videos in a noisy environment. In such situations mute the audio while editing and add a piece of appropriate background music.
However, if you are talking to the camera, make sure that you invest in a portable mic. It is impossible to do away with the noise that is captured when you speak without a mic. These unwanted elements will give an unprofessional look to your videos and may tempt viewers to drop off.
Identify the Platform top Post the Video
Knowing where you intend to post the video will help you plan the content accordingly. For example, if you want to post your travel videos on Instagram, try to restrict them to a 1-minute duration.
Since most people have their phones on silent while browsing through social media, adding subtitles to your travel videos will give better context to the viewer. However, when you post the video on YouTube, you can afford longer content.
Like every travel story, the journey of making a travel video is unique. You need to identify your strengths and use them to your advantage while telling the story. As you venture into the world of travel videos and share your stories with the world, here’s wishing you a fun-filled journey ahead.
