I’m very excited about this one! I vlogged my trip to Iceland and I’ve made a video – an actual video!
Contents:
Making the video
Watch the video
A few explanatory notes
No, I’m not going to become a travel vlogger. Writing is far more my thing than talking to cameras and editing video but now I’ve done it once… well, ok, I am going to keep going. I’ve filmed snippets of my travels since about 2012 and on every trip from 2015 onwards I’ve declared “I’m going to make a video about this one!”. At best, I’ve filmed enough to make a two minute music video. I have a handful of those kinds sitting on my YouTube channel but I’ve always wanted to make a real video. I wanted to do a series of “video diaries” from Russia and what I actually filmed barely comes to one minute stuck end to end so that didn’t work.
But I had a push this time. Have I talked recently about the Rebel Badge Book? (Oh yeah, only in my last two posts) Well, obviously I wanted to do my World Traveller badge. There are ten clauses and to earn the badge, you have to do clause one plus at least any other five. I did clause one – make a list of 10 places you’d like to travel to in the next five years and then I did clause seven, research the current visa and health requirements for those ten places. That’s how I discovered Iceland was so open, that I could get there and back without having a swab stuck down my throat. I can manage nose but I can’t even think about throat, let alone actually endure it. And so obviously I did clause four:
Go on a trip (ideally abroad if possible) and make a visual record – this could be a video, a scrapbook, a photo album or a series of sketches.
A video. Of course, I could just make a scrapbook. I usually do and I collected stuff for one this time – I just haven’t printed the photos and so I can’t really do the scrapbook until I can be bothered to pick 60-odd pictures out of 1,700. But a video – I’ve wanted to do that for years. I can bribe myself with a badge – buy the badge, prop it up on my laptop and refuse to award it to myself until I’ve made a video.
So I made a video! Over the nine days, I gradually got accustomed to talking to the camera – to be honest, this is something I’ve practised a tiny bit over the last two years. There are at least three videos filmed that will probably never get edited and see the light of day sitting somewhere in my photo albums – and when I got back, I started editing.
Oh, editing! I did days two and three in a single day. One day to edit two days’ worth of footage. Ok, that’s not so bad. But then day four took an entire day in itself and then I was back to work and editing got dropped. How come no one talks about editing being the longest and hardest part of video making? I think I’ve heard people say it gets quicker and easier with practice. I hope that’s true because I’m hoping to make a few more videos. Since Iceland, I’ve been off camping twice and… well, I failed to film much so there will be no videos of my overnight adventure on Purbeck or my wet & wild weekend on Exmoor which you’ll hear about on Thursday, but at some point I do want to make more videos. But not regularly. I’m not becoming a vlogger or a YouTuber.
Then, when I’d finished day six, it occurred to me that it might be useful to put things on screen that said where I actually was, not least because I can’t film at the swimming pools and it’s easy to not realise I’ve been there at all without a big label that says “LAUGARDALSLAUG!!!” I mean, ok, it might get the point across better if I added that that’s a pool but at least it gives the sense that it’s a place of importance and not just a random building. So I had to add all those in and I went and fixed – or at least improved – the sound in day two while I was at it and that meant re-exporting the whole lot and in some cases, re-stitching the day back together again and therefore re-exporting twice. I’m very pleased with the little labels. They feel like they add a level of professionalism to my first ever major vlog.
Then somehow I managed days seven, eight and nine all in one weekend. I was done – well, done with the heavy work. I stitched them together into a preliminary full video, 37 minutes long and with some issues. I sorted the issues on Monday and made an introduction and then exported the whole thing again. The final version hopefully. Three and a half long hours to wait before I could watch it all and see if it was tolerable.
It was. There are things I don’t like – there’s a cut on the Sunday that’s just too much work to fix and there’s a small but glaring sound thing on Monday but it’ll take longer to fix than it’s worth. Of course, I could still re-do any given day from scratch and the moment I press publish is the moment my heart’s desire will be to demolish everything and start again but… right now, I’m proud of my big awkward newborn. I made a vlog 37 minutes long, with labels and voiceovers and a trailer-style intro and chapters! YouTube let me use chapters!
I’ve learned a lot from this video. Number one is that I’ve got a lot still to learn about sound. Number two is that I need to talk to the camera more. I should be doing a “good morning, this is what I’m doing today” every single day and I should preferably be doing a “this is what I did today, goodnight!” every day if I can. I should also be explaining what I’m doing or where I am. I’ll be back in Iceland sooner or later and I’ll do that in my next video. Call this my baptism of fire.
Watch the video
And now, after all that, may I present: my Iceland vlog!
There are a few things I should have put in the video that I just didn’t so consider this the behind-the-scenes.
As I entered the Blue Lagoon via its inside door, there’s a sign saying something like “please do not leave footwear and towels here”, next to the huge line of flip-flops you can see in the video. Wish I’d filmed the sign too.
When the horse picks up its speed, that’s a unique Icelandic gait called the tölt. The actual live sound is muted, otherwise you’d hear me keeping up a consistent low wail of horror because it’s far too fast for someone as new to riding as me. The horse’s name is Vorboðar. It means “Bringer of Spring” and he’s clearly not doing his job.
I go on a bit about how the hot river is a hike up a mountain. It’s always referred to as “the hot river valley”, so I had no idea that it was going to require me to climb 300m up the side of a mountain, let alone in those weather conditions.
The reason I wore my sandals in the pouring rain on the Golden Circle was that my boots still had puddles in them from the horse riding and the hot river hike. They, and the hat, didn’t dry out for a good few days.
I mentioned swimming ten lengths at Sundhöllin on my first day but actually, I did a lot more than that! I went to Laugardalslaug on Monday 18th and swam 32 lengths of their 50m pool (1600m, just 9m off the full mile!). At Vesturbæjarlaug on Wednesday 20th, I swam 50 lengths of their 25m pool (1.25km) and on Thursday 21st while I waited for the airport bus, I swam 50 lengths of Sundhöllin’s 25m pool (another 1.25km). In total, I swam 4.35km while I was in Iceland, which is 174 lengths of your average council-run pool in the UK.
Look how the lagoon at Nauthólsvík is steaming! It’s right next to Reykjavik Domestic Airport, so there are small planes coming in overhead all the time. On the headland opposite, that lumpy thing you can see right at the end is the turf house that contains the restaurant and changing facilities for the Sky Lagoon. It’s right there but it takes the best part of an hour to get to by bus.
On the flight back, we were waiting for a second bus-load. The plane almost entirely filled up and I was sat next to someone who Used the Bag.
Plus blog posts for some of the days in case you want to know about it all in more detail: