I’m back to Iceland this week! Two whole weeks off on the videos and I’m back! I’m back with a video an hour and a quarter long chronicling my trip to Iceland over this summer. Umm… if you’re watching my videos as and when I’m putting them out (and if you’re not, why not??), you’ll have already seen everything in this video. It’s literally just the eight-part series from a few weeks ago stitched together.
Now, this is by way of being an experiment – I knew that the Iceland April 2022 video was my most-viewed by a long way. It’s got nearly six times as many views as the entire summer 2022 series put together. The summer 2023 series is following the summer 2022 series in terms of views – ie, no one’s watching them. Which is fair enough; I’m very new to this, both the filming and the editing and I have 22 followers. But I put the February vlog together and it had to be one big vlog because there wasn’t enough material to scrape together even three minutes of footage for about half the days. No other choice, it had to be one longer video. Within a week, it was my fifth most-viewed video and by now, it’s my third. It seems that longer videos with more generic titles just get in front of more eyes. So I took the eight videos from this summer and stitched them together and I’m going to see what happens with its views. It’s an hour and a quarter, which is the longest video I’ve ever done. This is going to be a lesson in “do I do short viewer-friendly daily videos or do I do long videos from now on?” but it’s looking like YouTube does prefer the longer ones and if that’s so, then that’s so.
I’ve also given it a bit of a clickbaity title. I’ve watched a lot of Ring Road and Iceland road trip videos this autumn and I’ve realised I’ve seen the same places over and over again. And sure, I do go to some of them but probably 70% of what appears in this video doesn’t appear in 95% of other people’s videos. Have you ever seen anyone do the trip out to Askja? No, neither have I. Have you seen the glacier lagoon from on the water? Not really, no. Usually a drone. And does anyone else camp? Nope. I didn’t mean to do a “I’m not like other girls, I go to different places” video (especially after yesterday’s blog in which I decried “I’m not like other girls”) but the fact is that most of these places are not covered by most travel vloggers (see Iceland Itineraries according to YouTube for more on that!).
So, there’s nothing new in videos this week but if you haven’t already watched this series, maybe it’ll suit you more to see it in its new long format. I’ve already told you all the behind-the-scenes from the various days but in short: I didn’t plan to drive around the Ring Road this summer, I planned to spend the time in the north, just popping down to the east to go to Vök Baths. I hired a small car, I took a small tent and I headed up to the west coast and then across to the north. I went in six different geothermal baths, ranging from beachside concrete community pool Guðlaug Baths to the big Myvatn Nature Baths to wild hidden swimming pool Seljavallalaug. I explored steaming volcano Leirhnjúkur and uplifting ready-to-erupt caldera Askja, I drove across the Desert of Misdeeds and I kayaked on the glacier lagoon.
I learned a few things from making this series. Number one is that I really realised that if I’m going to film myself in dusty rocky places, I shouldn’t wear clothes that match. Bright clothes on my travels in future. The pink t-shirt on the Askja day works so much better in motion than the grey-green reputation tour t-shirt on the glaciers & mountains day. Second, although I’m getting better at remembering to introduce every new day, I’m still prone to forgetting to close off each day (see if you can spot the day where the sign-off was done three weeks later when I was home, and then go back to the summer 2022 series and see if you can spot where I did it in that one too!). I’m getting more comfortable talking to a camera but there’s still quite a bit I miss. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you don’t need to see every minute of every day but I definitely wish I’d done a bit more in the car. Wish I could find the sucky GoPro holder so I could film a bit of the scenery I was driving through. But on the whole, I think both of the summer in Iceland series that I’ve done are not terrible. For comparison, I don’t have anywhere near enough footage of my trips to Paris, Frankfurt or my UK camping weekends away to make even a short video and I’ll see later on what I can pull together for Helsinki. But Iceland – mostly, I seem fairly motivated to film. It just makes my channel a bit of an Iceland monolith.
And with all that said, on with the video! (What do you make of this thumbnail, by the way? Does that scream Iceland in summer, warm, sunshine, good choice of tent, lakes and mountains and whatnot? Well, I like it. It’s different to the others and it looks warm and appealing, if not terribly Icelandic, if you’re expecting ice.)