Just like last year, spent another winter weekend in Stowe, Vermont back in January. It was a great time of skiing, beer, and hot tubs - all of my favorite winter activities.

Below is the video summary of the trip. Compared to last year, I have upped my GoPro game to include additional angles that create more variety in the final product. This 3 minute video was made from tens of hours of footage, and I think I only just had enough to make it interesting.

My video creation pipeline has also matured. Key learnings in this new process:

  1. Find the right music. Setting the footage and scene timing against the soundtrack can only be done when you first have that music selected. Also, the right music sets the mood for the entire video and you want to know that up front before any editing happens.
  2. Prep the video. A ski run down the mountain is a 10-15 minute clip, a majority of which is fairly boring and repetitive. Cutting out the best parts into mini-clips which can be used during the editing process helps me stay in the editing flow later on.
  3. Storyboard a little. I can certainly get better at this, but having a “roadmap” of which pieces of video go together to tell a story end to end helps when you’re mid-edit and don’t know what comes next.
  4. Varied shots make for interesting video. Something I did not do as well last year was to capture shots of just everyday life as we got around in Stowe. Food, drink, walking downtown, etc. I made it a point this year to capture a wider range of what we did.
  5. Reuse editing skills you have. I learned how to do the polaroid photo effect during my New England Leaf Tour video last year. It was a relatively quicker process to use that technique again in this video, because I (mostly) knew what I was doing.

The last bit of advice I have for my future self, and what worked well here, is to plan to spend at least 3-4 days and spread out the 10-15 hours doing an edit like this. I am sure my lack of skill contributes to how long this edit took, but knowing up front the size of the time investment helps keep me sane when I’m 3 hours into an editing session and losing my mind. Just step away, come back later, and it’ll be a lot easier!

Note: Why does that video title card say “take two”? Some folks were fairly lackadaisical in their delivery of footage to me, so I had to make a second cut looping in more of their shots!