600 Pound Mom Goes to Paris – and other travel video no no’s

My father died on Christmas Eve, three years ago.

Among the things he left behind was a lifelong collection of color slides.  He had a 35mm Kodak camera he had picked up after WW2 and used it all his life, along with a hand-held light meter.

He was strictly an amateur photographer, the kind of guy who would take out the camera for birthdays or weddings or on trips.  Then, he would carefully mark each slide “Rome 1966” and put them in a series of metal boxes.

It was those metal boxes that I inherited.

His slide projector was long since gone, but last Thanksgiving, I bought an old Kodak Carousel and started loading his slides into the trays so I would show them to the family after Thanksgiving dinner.  This meant I had to look at each slide.

Looking at a lifetime’s collection of pictures, I learned an important lesson about ‘what to shoot’.

The images quickly fell into two categories – famous buildings and people.

As I parsed the slides, year by year, it quickly became apparent to me that the only ones that were really interesting were the ones of people – particularly people I knew. The shots of buildings of the Grand Canyon were, in a word, boring.

There’s a good lesson here for those of us who want to shoot travel videos.

Travel is probably the number one venue for video – particularly if you want to sell it!  It’s endless, and has endless appeal.  The great thing about travel is, all you have to do is ‘show up’ and you are pretty much 90% done.  Going to Bangladesh is inherently more interesting than taking your video camera for a tour of Summit, New Jersey (particularly if you live in New Jersey).

As the world of video moves online, two things are happening simultaneously:

The demand for video is exploding.  Not so long ago, there was a very limited market for video of any kind:  TV networks and cable, and that was about it.  That industry generated so much money that they could afford ‘professional’ crews and massive travel budgets.  In those days, as well, the world was, while not entirely unkown, little known.  It was still exotic to go to ‘little known places’ with a film crew.

A similar phenomenon had dominated newspaper journalism in the 19th Century.  Going to Africa was so exotic and so unknown that newspapers could keep an audience rivited by the adventurs of Henry Morton Stanley as he ‘searched’ for Dr. David Livingston (in ‘darkest’ Africa), and for the source of the Nile.  As communications got better, as travel got easier (both technology-driven) the ‘value’ of that kind of journalism simply vanished. What was once of interest (and hence of value) became commonplace and relatively worthless.

The same has happened to video.  As travel became easier and easier and as the means of communication became (and continue to become) better and better, the ‘value’ of simply going somewhere and turning on the camera continues to diminish.

This means that if you are going to go to Paris, for example, don’t bother to film the Eiffel Tower.  Everyone has seen it, and if they haven’t, it is easy enough for them to do so by simply going online.  And it’s not just the Eiffel Tower. It’s also Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

The first time I went to Angkor was in 1988, when the area was still a bid dodgy and under loose KR control.  Then, it was interesting.  Today, it’s about as difficult to get access to as Disneyland.

So we find ourselves in an interesting place:  the demand for video is exploding and the profusion of content is also making it increasingly difficult to create content that is both interesting and of value directly as a function of the very technology that now makes it possible for us to play in that field.

What to do?

Many networks have found solace in reality TV shows.  They have migrated from ‘wow, look at that amazing pyyramid’ to ‘wow, look at that guy with the tumors all over his face’.  These are real-life reality shows that aired in 2012 (and only a very small sampling):  My Mom Weighs 600 Pounds, The Man Who Lost His Face, and The Woman Who Ate Couch Cushions.

So at one end of the extreme we have endless videos of buildings and statues, which are living death; at the other end, endless videos of the physically and emotionally deformed, which are death of a society.

Can we do something different?

The potential is in our hands. Literally. We don’t have to be victimized by a handful of network executives who are constantly searching for the bottom of the barrel (who knew it was so far down?) and still have not gotten there.  If we can make content (which we can), then we can make a difference.

This brings me back to culling the slides.  I tossed aside the ones of Buckingham Palace as boring.  My old man never shot stills of a 600 pound woman, so that was easy to eliminate.  What was left?

Family pictures. But what made them interesting was that we had a personal connection to them. There was a ‘story’ (an arc of story, I like to think) in our own lives.

As we take control of the abominable content on television and begin to create it on our own, we have a chance to re-invent the medium (I would say to rescue it for its own good).  And what makes compelling video? Things that resonate with us personally.

This is not really a revelation.  Great writers have known this for a long long time.

Great characters married to great stories that everyone can relate to in their own lives, even if it is not specifically about them.

So in your own videos, find the characters. Then tell a story that everyone can both understand and relate to.

You will find that you won’t need 600 pound moms.

And you probably won’t have much call for shooting the exteriors of buildings either.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013