Every now and again, I compile a series of photos to create a walking-themed video for my YouTube channel and today, I’ve uploaded my latest, based upon a Cotswolds walk around Painswick from May 2014.
I wrote a blog post about it last June, which you can read here. Otherwise, please continue reading for a little more information on this video. Your feedback, at the end, is welcome and appreciated as always.
This is a particular video I’ve been meaning to edit and upload for a long time. By comparison to my average videos; this one was relatively quick and straight-forward. It was only the sourcing and selection of the music that caused me some difficulty.
Back in May, I was doing a lot of 20-mile-ish walks and, at the same time, trying to keep the woodworking content fluent on my channel. It didn’t feel like the ‘perfect‘ time to upload then and I couldn’t decide upon the ‘perfect‘ time in any of the seven months that followed! There’s nothing particularly significant about a February release; I’ve just decided to shed the skin of a perfectionist, if only for this weekend.
One thing I’ve tried to do differently in this walking video is leave more of the landscape shots as ‘stills’, where I would previously make the majority of them ‘moving’ (using crop, zoom and slide functions) so that the viewer would feel as though they were traveling along with my camera… I welcome anyone’s critique. Some may feel the individual scenes are too short and as if the pace is traveling too fast but my intention was again, to cram as much in to these four-minutes as possible without allowing the viewer’s mind to wander too easily – I typically find my focus fades in other people’s videos where they contain long scenes, while the more successful YouTubers generally include frequent changes with alternating camera angles.
Finding the right kind of music is a real chore with this. I can find a tune I think is suitable (and free to use, of course) but they very rarely match or exceed the length of my videos. Here, for instance, I decided to loop the single track and I think I just about got away with it.
This also reminds me that I still have footage from two similar-length walks down on the Quantocks, at around the same time of year. There’s no panoramic video with those and only still photos but I’ll try harder to get those (if not something else) uploaded soon. I believe you can have too much of a good thing and, just like my blog; I like to believe that no one subject defines my channel… So, I’ll try to mix it up in between my usual array of woodworking and DIY videos.
If you enjoy walking and appreciate the outdoors then, I hope you also enjoy this. Your feedback is always welcome and I hope this video also serves as a reminder that in spite of the cold we’re lumbered with right now, spring is only a couple of months away!
Thanks for reading and for watching!