Here’s a video challenge for you: try to fit one year worth of travel into a one minute video. Turns out, combining all your favourite moments in one tiny video is a bit of a stretch, but very fun. It’s also an excellent exercise to recap, look back, count your blessings AND practice with new short-form video content. I’ll be honest: I got inspired by travel edits on TikTok (the max length of videos is currently 60 seconds) and decided I wanted to try it for myself. Yep, it’s not just dancing teens on there. If you can sift through the body rolls and find the right creators, you’ll be rewarded by inspiring edits. Anyway, here is the result of my own experiment:
Sometimes it’s easy to let the struggles overshadow all those beautiful moments. So, after editing this video, my feelings about 2019 are definitely a tad more positive than a few days ago. I’ve had a few ARGHHH moments the past few months (you know, the freelance life), but after editing I realized that the first half of the year was jam-packed with incredible experiences. So it only makes sense; you have to balance everything out. It can’t be a party all year round. Now I feel all reset and ready for 2020. I think.
How To DIY: Tools and Tips to Create Your Own 1 Minute Video
Maybe you’ll want to do a similar video yourself next year. Remember: the theme doesn’t necessarily have to be a travel. If you’re a painter, you can make a compilation of all the times you filmed yourself painting. Maybe you’re a dancer or you like to do yoga. You probably get the gist, right? You can apply it to almost any activity. Here’s a few handy tips to help create simple compilation videos like this yourself:
- With simple formats like these, you don’t have to necessarily open up your video editor on your laptop. You can easily use mobile video editing apps like Rush (my personal favourite) or Quik (easy to use for beginners and includes native audio library). Other options are InShot or Over.
- Try to find a nice, upbeat and copyright-free tune to match your clips to the right timing. You can browse YouTube for copyright-free playlists (or check the Audio Library), for example. If you’ve got a lot of clips to fit into that 1 minute (like my 2019 recap), the audio has to be somewhat upbeat so you can quickly switch up the clips to the tempo.
- Try to use original clips without added filters when you start editing. It will look a lot better when you apply the same filter/style to all the clips when you’re done. This will give the video a more consistent look and feel.
Looking for more inspiration and visual content ideas for your social media channels? Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram for my real-time social media experiments. I’m also active on Twitter and Facebook, so let’s connect in 2020!
