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Summer has come to a close. While it’s not official on the calendar quite yet, the kids are back in school, summertime activities are wrapping up, and you are working on getting your family back into the swing of a “normal” schedule.
Right now is the PERFECT time to start processing those Summer memories into home movies before they are forgotten.
Whether you had a Summer full of backyard bbq’s and sprinkler fun or you spent a month touring Europe with your kids (sorry – is that just me dreaming about doing that someday?), I am confident that we all have one thing in common.
We all have digital photos and “footage” taking up space on our phones, memory cards, or both.
Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of not knowing where to start, we are going to walk you through a few steps that will not only safeguard those memories for years to come, but will leave you with some beautiful home movies that you will want to re-live and re-watch with your family over and over again.
Upload Your Memories
STEP 1 – Grab your phone and / or memory cards and upload all of those photo and video files. If you’d like more information on exactly how we do that, you can find it here.
STEP 2 – Organize your files. Our digital files are organized by placing them into folders by event, month, and year so that they can each be easily found.
STEP 3 – DUPLICATE! I’ve said it a hundred times if I’ve said it once, back it all up again. If you don’t have your files saved in more than one location, be mentally prepared to lose those files. Losing years of digital files has happened to us more than once. Whether you love some sort of cloud storage, have things on your computer, or use external hard drives… put those files in more than one location if you don’t want to lose them. Below are our favorite hard drives that we use to back up (and back up again) all of our files.
For the record, I am totally preaching to myself here. We’ve had so many things happening over the summer that we’ve needed more space on our cameras and have dumped everything into a giant folder for sorting out later. Upload, save, organize, save again.
Choose Your Soundtrack
This is one of our favorite things to do. Whether it’s a short trailer or full length home movies, we love adding a soundtrack to our lives. Choose the song or songs that are going to encapsulate your favorite memories. My kids light up all the time when they recognize a song from one of our home movies. There is just something about the music that allows your mind to go right back and see those memories in your mind when you hear it.
Be sure to keep in mind copyright laws and how you’d like to share your videos when you are making your song choices. Most social media platforms are (rightfully so) super strict on mainstream media songs being uploaded to their sites. If this movie is something you want to widely share, you might want to consider purchasing royalty free music before starting your video. We personally love Artlist and if you use this link, you’ll receive two months for free! Their library of music is amazing and the music you have used to create your home movies remains royalty free after your subscription is up.
Choose How to Create Your Home Movies
There are so many more options here than there used to be. From easy-peasy phone apps that can help you automate and create in a few clicks to professional software that allows you to tweak clips and customize until your heart’s content, there is more to explore here than we can cover in one blog post. Editing on the GoPro Quik app, iMovie on our laptop, and Final Cut pro are a few we have worked with and we will dive deeper into tips, tricks, and tutorials in the future.
Find Your Favorite Video Clips
You should already have everything you need at your fingertips because you’ve already backed it all up. Fantastic work! You don’t need every clip that you recorded, and you don’t need to use the entire clip either. Right now, you are looking for those clips that you want to remember. My husband is looking for the ones that are creatively captured – I’m looking for those tiny moments that I don’t want to forget (even if the quality isn’t there – the moment is worth it for me). Start importing those clips into your platform of choice.
Start Telling Your Story
We tell our stories in multiple ways, depending on the situation. For some events / vacations, we organize clips in a way that takes you from start to finish. There is a clear beginning and end. For others, we prefer to do a mish-mash. We choose the highlights and sprinkle them throughout the film. If you did a big family vacation over the Summer, it might make sense to put your clips in chronological order. If you want to do a Summer highlights film, mixing it up might be more appropriate. Choose the option that works best for the story that you are wanting to tell.
Back to the Music
We have our music and we have our clips, but now it’s time to go back and really start to consider that music choice. When we begin to edit our films together, we place beat markers throughout the song before ever editing our clips. By doing this, we know that the clips will transition right when we want them to. In addition, Aaron is listening to the song as a whole. He’s considering mainly how the song builds dynamically, beats, and overall feel.
Start Editing Your Clips
Grab the highlights from each clip, cut clips to fit to the music, edit each to taste for color, and add transitions that add a layer of polish to your film. You can spend as little or as much time here as you’d like. Aaron can spend 15 minutes on an app and come up with a quick movie to share on social media, but he also puts 50+ hours into our full length travel films that we love to watch as a family. We will have more in-depth information to share with you on the blog as it progresses, so be sure to subscribe if this is something that interests you.
Save Your Home Movie
And we’ve come full circle. Save, export, and backup your finished film. We’d recommend exporting your film in 1080p resolution. That’s full HD. If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, leave a comment letting us know if you’d like us to spend more time getting into resolutions and what they mean. We can definitely get into that as well. Have everything saved in one place so that those home movies are easy to find and easy to watch together as a family. For us, the finished home movie file gets backed up on an external hard drive and then we also upload to Vimeo to have them ready to watch on our TV together as a family.
Enjoy Your Memories
When it comes to family movie nights in our house, we all pile on the couch and open up Vimeo to watch our favorite memories over and over again. Our kids absolutely love watching their little selves on big adventures and we cherish the moments that we get to re-live. Our films are everything from year-end compilations to vacation videos, adoption stories to short getaways. We love watching them all and I know that you will love yours just as much. It definitely takes some effort, but it’s all worth it.
Our Favorite Summer Home Movie
This is one of the films that we have on replay in our house right now. One of our favorite bits of Summer is always the weekend of Labor Day. The streets in the downtown shut down for 3ish days of fun in our neighborhood. We love the fireworks and great food, lazy mornings of sitting on our porch and people watching, rides and activities, and so much more. The weekend wraps up with family and friends gathered in our home and a parade to watch meander down our street. The whole weekend gets blocked out on our calendars with no extras allowed – just spontaneous enjoyment of “the party” (what my kids like to call it).
Aaron was commissioned by the festival to put together a promotional video this year, so we are reaping the benefits of his work that showcases our favorite weekend. He used a DJI Mavic Pro, DJI Osmo Pocket, Insta360 One X, Nikon D800, GoPro, and an iPhone X to grab all of these video clips and create a movie for the festival.
Here is a little peek at what makes it so special for us.
There is so much detail that we could get into on video creation and doing it well. If this is something that interests you and you’d really like to learn more, please be sure to subscribe to our blog posts so that you can be the first to read new content. We are also going to be putting together an email newsletter that will provide more detailed information and tutorials.
If you are in the opposite camp of “Hey-I-would-love-to-have-our-family’s-memories-on-film-but-this-is-overwhelming-to-even-consider-tackling-myself-wow-I-need-to-breathe…” 🙂 We can help with that too. Drop us a note about your project and we’ll get back with you with the details of how we can work for you to take your clips and make a keepsake that your family will enjoy for years to come.
