Video project 'Backpacking Sweden'

Storytelling has always been fascinating to me. As a child and teenager I loved books and was an avid reader and even attempted to write books myself. At some point I hope to find the time to complete them, bt in the meantime I wanted to try something nore manageable: Learning how to tell a story in a video.

Not a particular story, just how to make a story out of an event. A hiking trip in Sweden with a friend of mine was the perfect opportunity for me to explore the world of motion picture storytelling. Fixed chronology, clear start end end, lots of small issues to be solved, lots of material to cut, combine, and arrange. And photos by my friend that I also used to express our child-like joy at all the red houses.

But boy had I underestimated how much work cutting and editing the main video would be … I ended up working 50+ hours for one hour of playtime. Especially, because I wasn’t certain what the pace of the story should be. The travel Youtuber Shiey was a big inspiration, already while recording the material, but it was still difficult to translate that inspiration to a consistent narration and find my own style; which level of details to show when in service of what.

With feedback from friends and family I tuned and polished, until I felt like additional effort wasn’t justified anymore, especially given the limits of the source material. Cutting and editing is powerful, but there is only so much one can do with a given source material. Even though if I would do this today, I would make different choices, I am still fairly content with the fruits of my labour. The videos have barely a dozen views, mostly from friends, but for me, the most important part was to actually make them and turn the disjointed Go-Pro clips into a real story.