My family went to Kauai in Hawaii this past December and I was thinking about some way to document the trip to look back on but also share our experiences with others.
Somehow, the hundreds of photos from different phones, angles, and quality piled into one iCloud album just did not could not be the only way to look back on a trip. Here are some of the ways I thought about making documentation for the trip:
- photo slideshow/board: Apple kind of does this already but I have often found its selection random
- journaling: This is great for predominantly solo trips (I still have one from a solo trip in 2023), but challenging to do when with others and engaging in active experiences the entire day
- vlog: short (hopefully) and curated (by me) to reflect different parts of the trip and memories (ding ding ding, I sense a winner)
We now have our objective: a vlog. Now to the software for making it. I have to say, I have been seeing so many AI powered video editors popping up recently (among others, mosaic, invideo) and something feels off about them. I found this quote by prominent film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker (Wolf on Wall Street, Hugo, Goodfellas) who articulates this discomfort quite well:
Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you’re frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again.
I have to be honest; I have not tried these softwares so I cannot confidently speak about them, but I have used AI for coding and other tasks so I wonder if the same questions apply. Do you have that same relationship you have with the final video when you let AI do its thing? Do you really explore all the video clips ( slow ) and know what your corpus of data is before diving in (AI lets you “jump the gun” in this way)? Does you feel proud of the final vlog or that it “did the job”? I can’t speak for everyone, but I would surely be thinking about these types of questions.
Alas, I went into the adobe suite (I acknowledge issues of closed-source software here, will add to the list of topics to write about) to see what I could do and where I got annoyed in preparation for some future research projects. The result is below (with screenshots of the behind the scenes)! Hope you enjoy 🕺
final result
side note, I had to reduce the quality of this because youtube was blocking my upload due to the audio copyright 🙃
behind the scenes
