A few days ago I mentioned that I wanted to complete a sailing video I started working on about bringing a sailboat from Hawaii to California. Yesterday I used part of my day off because of MLK and finished the video. It can be found on YouTube and represents my latest effort in learning about how to make good adventure videos.
It is really easy to come up with ideas for videos but they take a lot of work to put together well. With this project, I started the video over a year ago. I pulled together all of the photos from the trip and realized that the 62 I had, weren't nearly enough. The interesting stuff that happened during the trip kept everyone so busy that nobody bothered to pull out a camera and take pictures of it. We had 2 cameras onboard but neither were any good compared to today's standards. A telephoto lens would have helped a lot but we didn't have one and never bothered to get pictures of whales or dolphins. Cameras also don't really show the magnitude of the waves on the open ocean either. You really need to be out there to understand how truly massive some of the waves got to be.
Once I had all of the photos, I needed to put together a script. To help me with that, I went through my journal and took notes about the significant events that happened daily. I then had to match story narration with the limited pictures. Needless to say, a lot of what happened doesn't appear in the video. While we started the sailing trip in the slop left over from Hurricane Jimena, the larger waves came at the end of the trip after another hurricane crossed Baja California and slapped us in the face. We were too busy hanging on to pull out a camera and take any pictures. Suffice it to say that we had several days where we surfed 50-foot waves for hours at a time.
With all of the night sailing I have done, it wasn't until this trip that I actually got to see where the story of mermaids came from. We had finally reached the coast of California and sailed into a patch of phosphorescence that lit up the water with any movement. The boat passing through created a glowing wake. We could also see fish swimming under the boat. We didn't know it but fish had been riding our bow wave the entire trip from Hawaii and dolphins knew they were there. Every so often a dolphin would swim toward our bow and grab one of the fish traveling with us. The glowing trail left by the dolphins looked very similar to the outline of a mermaid. We became so mesmerized by the scene we didn't even try to take a picture, not that one would have turned out because of the darkness.
Unfortunately I don't think I spent enough time working on the script as each time I view the video I come up with better ways of telling the story. I'd like to blame all my English teachers that required us to create a minimum essay length. Instead of learning to squeeze as much information into as few words as possible, I learned to use 20 words when 5 will do. It is a habit that will take the rest of my life to fix.
With this video I did learn a number of tricks to help with the sound. In the past I have added the background music first and then the narration. This time around I made sure to put the narration in first and that allowed me to adjust all of the narration sound levels so they match. Now the viewer is not distracted by some sections being louder than others.
Recently I browsed through a book on how to make successful YouTube videos and it suggested throwing away your first dozen. This represents my fifth video and I hope there is a marked improvement over videos in the past. After all, that is the purpose of this exercise.
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