How to Document Your Trip
with Johnny & Iz Harris
Learn how to shoot, upload, edit, and share beautiful photos and videos from your travels.
About This Course
Seasoned travel filmmakers, Johnny and Iz, walk you through their approach to documenting travels including: their gear, storytelling techniques, filming tips, editing tutorials, and the philosophy for best capturing your trips. This course is for anyone who wants to better document their travels - NO camera experience or professional gear required. At the end of this course, you’ll be able to create your very own travel video and a set of edited photos that you can upload on the web or print into a book!
What You'll Learn
How to think of your trip as a story and what ingredients you need to capture that story
Gear available to enhance your travel documentation
How to extract, upload, and organize your trip footage
How to edit videos and photos (or how to use editing services that will do it for you)
How to be intentional about the way you shoot to decrease camera time and spend time enjoying the place you visit
Watch Some Samples
We've pulled out a few clips to give you a better idea of what to expect in the course
Course Breakdown
Why Document a Trip?
What You'll Learn
The main aim of this course is to allow you to capture the key moments of your travels while also enjoying your experience with your own eyes, and Johnny plans to share several methods to help you do this.
It's about Joy!
Johnny Harris shares his motivations for documenting his travels and suggests how you can find your own.
Gear
Overview
In this lesson, Johnny gives a brief overview of gear and the basic equipment needs for documenting a trip.
Guide to Gear Part 1: Stabilization
You can use many accessories to enhance your phone footage, and in this lesson, Johnny offers the pros and cons of different stabilization methods.
Guide to Gear Part 2: Cameras
Although you only need a phone to document your travels, Johnny Harris shares the value of having a dedicated camera. He details how to find the right camera for you and what to look for as you upgrade.
Camera Apps
Johnny talks through camera apps you can use for capturing and editing photos and videos.
Documenting Your Trip
Heading Out
Johnny prepares to head to Stockholm on his trip and shares the two pieces of gear he’ll use to capture his experiences.
Your Trip is a Journey
Your journey is a story, and Johnny explains why it’s important to think about it in this way so that you can capture your journey without missing key shots.
Beware of Trigger Happiness
It’s very easy to get trigger happy as soon as you arrive in a new place, so Johnny shares his top tips on combatting this on the first day of your trip.
Our Goal Today
In this lesson, Iz Harris joins Johnny as they share their main goals of intentionally documenting their time in Stockholm.
How to Capture a Place with Video
Learn Johnny’s top tips on capturing a place with video. Johnny walks through his process of choosing his shots, assessing how many he’ll take, and other tips as he’s deciding what to capture.
How to Capture a Place in Photos
Learn Iz Harris’ guidelines to capture a collection of photos that encapsulate your trip.
Capturing Local Character
In this lesson, Iz shares what local character is, why it's important to capture local character, and how you can capture it throughout your trip.
Using Action to Move your Video Forward
Transitional footage is important to link your journey between two experiences. Johnny shares some guidelines on capturing shots that will help move your video forward.
Organizing Files and Editing Services
Organizing Your Files
Johnny Harris shares his tips for organizing your footage once you’re back from your trip so that it’s easy to find your content in the future.
Have Someone Else Edit Your Video/Photo
If you don’t want to edit your own photos or videos, Johnny shares some services that can do it for you.
Editing Photos
Sorting and Culling
Learn Johnny’s process on how to sort through your photos and keep the very best ones.
Enhancing
Johnny Harris teaches some basic editing tricks to enhance your photos.
Outputting
Once you’ve finished editing your photos, it’s time to figure out how you want to store them — digitally or in a photo book. Johnny discusses the two options to help you find the best one to suit you.
Editing Video
Editing Software
Editing software varies in complexity and Johnny discusses the options available to you, no matter if you use mac or windows computers.
Editing Concepts
Using iMovie and Premiere Pro, Johnny shares alternative editing workflows, so you can figure out which one works best for you.
Refining Your Edit
Johnny takes a second pass at his edit and shares how you can refine your edit for length and story.
Music and Titles
In this lesson, learn how to find and incorporate music and text into your video.
Sharing Your Video
The final step is to output your video so that you can relive your memories. Johnny gives some advice on what settings to choose as you’re exporting.
Recap
Recap
Johnny wraps up the course and offers some of the key takeaways on how to document your trip.
Meet Your Instructors
Johnny & Iz are a husband and wife duo of travel journalists. Together, they travel the world, documenting, telling stories, and sharing them with their audiences. They also work as producers and hosts for Vox Media. Johnny has produced 5 seasons of his show Borders - a deep dive into and human perspective of the many Borders around the globe. Iz has produced two seasons of her series, Travel, Eat, Repeat where she takes on a location, showing it through the lens of the local cuisine. Now, as co-founders of Bright Trip, their mission is to take what they’ve learned and loved in traveling the world, and share that with others - creating a community of enlightened and curious travelers.
How to Document Your Trip
with Johnny & Iz Harris