A Perfect Summer Sail

This weekend, mother nature gave us the perfect summer day: warm but not hot, sunny, and a steady breeze between 8-12 kts. We took advantage of it to try something Shane and I have been talking about for a while, but hadn’t yet worked up the courage to try: filming enough content for our first YouTube video. You can watch it here:

I started preparing for this last week, by putting together a script and shot list to help us remember what to say, and what shots to capture. This was immensely helpful, as it gave us a sense of direction and purpose when we arrived at the boat.

We spent about two hours at the dock, filming various takes for what ended up being only the first minute or so of the video 😅. Finally, we set up the GoPro and got underway. We used a feature on the GoPro called TimeWarp, which allowed us to switch seamlessly between real-time and timelapse video capture. This turned out to be a really cool feature.

My original intent with this video was to capture us doing some basic maneuvering, however once we got to the boat, we realized we didn’t have many good options for where to mount the cameras. We did the best we could, but a lot of the shots ended up being impromptu shots taken with my iPhone.

We spent about three hours on the water, going back and forth across the sound only a couple of times. By 2:30pm, both of us realized we were getting pretty hungry, and in our excitement to film content for the video, we’d forgotten to bring lunch along with, so we headed back into the marina.

Once back home, it was time to edit the video content together. This was my first time editing a video, and I used iMovie since it’s included on my MacBook. I was impressed with all the features provided by iMovie, and before long, I had the basic structure of the video laid out.

I realized pretty quickly while editing the video together that we needed some music to cover all the B-roll we’d shot. Music and copyright on YouTube is a tricky subject. I did some research and finally signed up for a paid service called Epidemic Sound, which is supposed to allow us to use their music in our videos without copyright infringement. This post isn’t sponsored by them, and I’m not necessarily endorsing them; we’ll see how it works out long term.

With the music sorted out, the last requirement was recording voice-over, to add some context to the otherwise silent film I’d managed to produce. When producing content, audio is often times more important than video, so I used a high-quality mic to record the voice-overs, and edited them in. With that, the video was complete!

The last step before uploading was creating a video thumbnail. All the YouTubers I’ve watched say that choosing the right thumbnail is the most important thing you can do, because potential viewers only see the thumbnail and video title when deciding if they want to watch. Unfortunately we forgot to take specific pictures for the thumbnail, so instead, I just captured a frame from the video and edited some text onto it. We’ll be sure to take a better thumbnail next time.

And that was it! I uploaded the video, and now anyone in the world can watch it. It took a little less than 2 weeks to produce this video from start to finish. It was a really fun process, despite the work involved. I know we have a lot of room for improvement, but I’m actually pretty happy with how our first video turned out. If you liked the video, please subscribe to the channel!

Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time. ⛵