Travel videos. What are they? Why are they so fun to watch? This past month, PLP 9 has been experimenting with our own travel videos, á la Rick Steves. I made mine about the Royal BC Museum, in Victoria, after we visited Victoria as a class. Here it is:

This video took a long time to create. However, not only did it take a lot of time to film, record, and edit this video, I also spent a lot of time researching my topic and location, Indigenous Culture at the Royal BC Museum. I researched the effects of the Indian Act and the Douglas Treaties, and decided what I wanted to include in my video. Some of the research that I did was on-site, when we took the students tour that the museum offers, which is called the EAGLE program. EAGLE stands for Education and Appreciation Garnered through Listening and Exploring, and it helped me a lot with my video. There are also tours through the museum for adults. 

Another thing that we researched was travel videos! To make a travel video, you’ve got to watch a few, right? We looked at a few different examples of travel videos. 

First, we watched part of a Rick Steves video. Here’s one as an example.

Rick Steves is an iconic traveller. His combination of interesting locations, beautiful establishing shots, and shots of him walking and talking. Part of the idea of our video was to emulate his style of video. 

I tried to emulate Rick Steves through the beautiful shots of Victoria and the shots that show me talking. 

We also looked at some other examples of travel videos, like Departures and Michael Palin visits North Korea. 

After we’d finished our research, it was time to head out! We took the 7:00 a.m. ferry from Tsawwassen to the Island, which meant that we had to leave at 5:15 a.m! It was worth it, however, when we arrived in Victoria. Victoria is beautiful, and the city is both historical and modern, with some of the oldest buildings in Canada, most newly renovated. 

We visited several places in Victoria during our three day stay, including several museums, beautiful harbours, and the B.C. Legislature! I took a lot of b-roll in these locations, but I did most of my filming in the Royal BC Museum. Throughout my video, you can see lots of shots of different artifacts within the museum. The Royal BC Museum is enormous, with incredible exhibits, featuring a recreation of a historic gold rush town and a huge model of a woolly mammoth. It is definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in Victoria! 

A big part of this project was our filming partners. We were assigned filming partners who we would direct when we needed to get footage. I worked with Jackson, but only for a brief time, as he unfortunately got sick. Then, I worked with Amelia, whose partner was unable to work with her for different reasons. Working with a filming partner was difficult, because we knew what we wanted our shots to look like, and we had to explain that to the other person. In the end, some of my shots turned out pretty good, and exactly the way I was expecting. 

The last, (but arguably most important), part of creating my travel video was editing! I made several drafts of this video, making huge changes along the way. This was one of my first drafts:

The music didn’t really fit the subject matter, and some of the shots were a little long, especially my transitions. The audio was also very inconsistent. After this draft, we learned about the rule of thirds, which helps create a visually interesting project. 

You use the rule of thirds to place someone directly on a line a third of the way into the frame. This makes the background more visible while still making the viewer pay attention to the people in the shot. 

I made some edits, like changing the music, the volume, and cropping some videos to apply to the rule of thirds, creating the awesome video you see today. 

I think that the skills that I have learned during this project can help me a ton on our future projects; these skills are things like directing another person, using proper camera angles, utilizing the rule of thirds, and shooting shots of me standing and talking to the camera. 

Thanks for reading my blog post!