Top Tips on Creating an Immersive Video of Your Road Trip

For most travelers, a road trip is a perfect chance to get some rest from a daily routine, enjoy the landscape, find unique adventures, and create unforgettable memories of the best traveling moments. No wonder, that many people want to keep such precious moments by creating a road trip video which would be a much better reminder of your adventures than a bunch of souvenirs!

Top Tips on Creating an Immersive Video of Your Road Trip

But what makes a road trip video that impressive? How can you create the one, which will be a great memento of your traveling experience to a specific place? In this guide, we’ll cover the essential things to consider when preparing to shoot your road trip.

Let’s start right away!

Shooting an Outstanding Travel Video: 5 Tips to Know

To make an immersive road trip video, either a private family video or the one for posting to social media, there are still plenty of things to consider. Apart from planning your route, transport, and accommodation, you’ll also need to think over the must-visit places for your shoot, the format of your videos, camera, and other shooting equipment to pack, as well as the video software for editing your future road trip video.

Here, we’ve covered the best shooting practices for creating an awesome travel video.

Choose the Destination Place and Plan Your Route Ahead

First, for any road trip, it’s essential to pick up the destination and consider the way you’ll get there: by bus, plane, train, or by car. In most cases of road trip planning, travelers used to go by car or even rent the house on wheels, and also shoot some unique places they visit on their way or just showing the short shots of what happens beyond the main scenes. 

Additionally, that’s a great opportunity to add the stunning landscapes and fascinating must-see places to a travel video and even take some memorable pictures on your road.

Video to get inspired from: https://www.youtube.com

Ask Locals for Recommending their Favourite Places at Your Location

No one knows any place better than its local residents. In fact, this provides a great opportunity to find authentic and unique locations with a special atmosphere that can represent the major peculiarities of this country.

Also, don’t hesitate to search for the local shops with souvenirs, look for the must-try things when strolling in any country, and also notice the road signs, marquees, and other signs of interest on your way. At the same time, remember, your major goal is to enjoy the momentum to take the most impressive shots of your traveling. This way, not only you get delighted with your road trip, but the content for your travel video will be more interesting to review.

Video to get inspired from: https://www.youtube.com

Shoot the Most Catching Moments of your Trip

One of the most common mistakes to avoid for a road trip video is to stop shooting any single thing you notice on your way. Instead, make your shoots more dynamic to make the plot more interesting and interactive. This way, you’ll certainly ensure no one gets to sleep when watching your content: even if edited perfectly, without the clear idea of your road trip video, it will get bored even the most patient viewers. 

So, the pro tip here is to make memories, not shoots. For example, to enhance your road trip videos, you can:

  • find the unusual compose for your shots
  • meet the accidental locals and ask them for a small talk
  • follow the golden rule of composition and rule of thirds to make the shot more interesting and detail-oriented
  • plan the end of your moving shots in advance to get some more interesting pics for the editing
  • collect more closeups and medium shoots of every location, making a focus on the major peculiarities of the location: its size, color, architecture, details, nature, and more
  • use the 1-2-3 rule: try to shoot on different angles to get some more options when editing content with your video software

Pick Up Maps, Brochures, Postcards to Include to a Road Trip Video

Apart from this, don’t forget to add some interesting shoots that would represent the locations you’ve visited. For instance, using a pan and scan technique, a simple postcard set in a canted way can be a creative way to introduce the location.

Or else, if you have many places to show in your road trip videos - try the map shooting. It’ll not only be a catching intro to any location but also can represent the entire distance you’ve done to get anywhere, as well as make your video plot more informative and fun, as it helps segue to the next scenes!

Edit Your Road Trip Videos Thoroughly

After you finish your trip and are ready to share your impressions with a road trip video, it’s time to make your video live. As a rule, editing the road trip videos is one of the biggest challenges of travel video creation: it requires creative thinking, skills to work with the video editors, basic knowledge of story-making, and more. In other words, that’s not simply cutting and linking the shoots together. Let’s now discuss how to professionally edit a travel video to make it more interesting and interactive.

First of all, the process of any video editing starts with the exporting of all your shots from the cameras to your computer. Professional editors also recommend separating all the files in date order, so that it would be easier to find and build your video plot.

Next, think over the story you’d like to present with the video, browse your materials and pick up the best and the most dynamic shoots that ideally fit the plot of your road trip video. Then, you can trim video on Windows 7 or any other operating system you are using and combine the selected parts together to make the first scratch of your road trip video.. At this stage, you can also cut the shoots and make the shift between your shoots and scenes fit more organically.

When the shoots are fitted, add some videos, images, graphics, and sound effects to your video to make it more engaging to review. Professional video editing software like Shotcut, Lightworks, and FXhome also features a huge library of the most popular effects to use, so if you need some inspiration - get ready to find it there!

As soon as the video is finalized, the professional editors always verify the video and look for the minor issues that should be fixed in the graphic or audio of your video. And, if you’re going to share it in the video, don’t forget about the intriguing preview image to get people interested in it at a glance!

Conclusion

Whatever location you’ll choose for your next traveling, this guide to the road trip videos will certainly come in handy. With the thrilling scenes, impressive story, perfectly ordered shots, and the nicest video effects added to your videos, you can easily create a memorable yet catching video of your adventures that can amaze anyone in just a few seconds!