How and why adding movement will improve your travel videos

It’s vacation season, so why not take some awesome videos while you’re there? There are many tricks to make your travel videos better and more engaging, and Matti Haapoja from TravelFeels focuses on one of the important ones – adding movement.

His video adds nicely to Brandon Li’s, where he talks about the most common travel video problems. The lack of movement is one of them, and Matti gives you three big reasons why movement adds to the story, along with the tips how to achieve it and three example videos to learn from.

1.Revealing locations

Movement is one of the good ways to reveal the location of your shoot. You can do it by filming a 360-degree video of the scenery and reveal what’s around you. Another idea is to follow your subject along the street until the panorama of the city reveals ahead of him/her. You can also start from a small part of the area and then zoom out to reveal the scenery.

2. Adding the sense of exploration

The movement in the videos adds the sense of exploration of the place you’re filming. You can film your subject as he or she is getting to know the place. Film the action and incorporate the activities in the shots.

Handheld camera shake can sometimes add the sense of exploration and action, but sometimes it just looks unprofessional. I believe it’s up to you to figure out when it’s good to use it, and when stabilization will be your best friend.

3. Making the edit flow

Adding movement is one of the ways to make the edit flow from one shot to the next. If you have the movement in one frame and then add it to the next (for example movement from left to right), when you edit the video, the transition from the shots will look smoother and more natural.

Matti picked three videos to demonstrate his points, and his pick of the day from Cody Blue contains all the elements he mentions. You can watch it and take notes, pay attention to what you like and use the techniques for your own travel videos.