Music: Iguazu by Gustavo Santaolalla (from the movie Babel)
The first shots from my recent New Zealand holiday. This footage taken in and around the Tongariro National Park in the center of the North Island - with the help of my Manfrotto 560B monopod and the Twoneil DOF adapter (static).
What I learnt while making this video is that for every well framed static shot, you need a number of fluid "fly on the wall" shots to inject a little life into what is essentially a bunch of nature shots put to music. When you are shooting it is hard to see the value of filming "off the cuff" through the vibrating windshield of your car. But in editing mode, these kind of shots can really help to pull your more static shots together into a narrative.
A lot of people are quite critical of the number of videos on vimeo which are, when you boil each down, just various landscape shots strung together loosely with music. I don't mind such videos, providing the shots are taken with some care and imagination.
However, for this video I wanted to at least try to edit together a visual narrative to keep things a little more interesting. Unfortunately, as holiday videos go, I only thought about this after I arrived home - so I'm working from a limited palette.
Anyway, would love to get some suggestions about where to take this kind of footage from here.
My editing techniques used thus far really just extend to basic trimming of length, so I would love to get some tips and see some examples of people taking their holiday footage and making something more imaginative and unexpected - to give me a bit on inspiration of what to try next (both editing and shooting).
Hope you like it.
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