In December 2011 my wife and I took a vacation to St Lucia for our honeymoon. It was the perfect place to toy around with making a video with footage from the iPhone 4S. We spent eight days there hanging out at the beach, swimming, snorkeling, and sightseeing — all while I documented our adventures. This is a brief essay about how it all come together.
Gear
With 1080P recording, built-in image stabilization, and 64 GB of storage this thing was a champ at taking great shots. Even when recording the sunset clip (over an hour in length) it didn’t overheat.
Telephoto Lens for iPhone 4/4S
My wife had purchased this for me earlier in the year and I hadn’t found much of a use for it until this trip. It comes with a removable zoom lens, a hard case with standard thread mount, and a table-top tripod. This allowed me to get super low with some of the shots.
Barring all of the controversy surrounding this application I purchased it, and have so far loved it. It was easy to import the footage and dump it into a project, and outputting to Vimeo was really simple and quick.
Footage
I had no narrative in mind when I started shooting these clips. I didn’t really think about what I was going to do with the footage until about a day or two into the trip. I just started looking at things the same way that I consider taking a picture: what angles make for interesting shots? What will I want to remember when I come back? What would others like to see? This sense of purpose motivated me to keep an eye out for interesting subjects. It wasn’t until I returned to the US that I started thinking about how to compile all of them into a video sketch.
Music and Editing
When bringing clips into a timeline for editing I start off by selecting the music that will accompany the video. Choosing music that matches the mood is the first step I take when making short-form films, as it helps to form the narrative of the overall piece. The trick was to find something that would work well and be free to use.
Conveniently Nine Inch Nails released their Ghosts I-IV album in 2008 with a Creative Commons license. I say “conveniently” because this album is something of a mish-mash of musical sketches that are fairly short in length, and run the gamut of musical emotion swaying between hard and heavy, to light and airy. For this video I selected 13 Ghosts II among three other candidates, 21 Ghosts III, 22 Ghosts III, 28 Ghosts IV. 13 Ghosts II has the right mix of playful piano and simple bass line that matches the relaxed spirit and feeling of the footage.
Totals
Shots Taken: 50
Shots Used: 22
Length of Footage: 1 Hour 46 Minutes and 59.42 Seconds (1:46:49.42)
Length of Longest Clip: 1 Hour 8 Minutes and 20 Seconds (The time-compressed sunset shot at the end)
Length of Shortest Clip: 6 Seconds (The window view after landing)
