Sometimes the best-laid travel plans can still run into the unexpected. Missed flights or transport plans, visa problems, or simply finding that the place you’ve chosen to visit isn’t quite as welcoming as you’d expected. What can you do when your videos are full of unexpected dramas?

What to do when your trip didn’t work out as planned

Learn how to edit better videos with tips from a professional video editor
Have you ever been on a holiday where things went wrong?

Sometimes the best-laid travel plans can still run into the unexpected. Missed flights or transport plans, visa problems, or simply finding that the place you’ve chosen to visit isn’t quite as welcoming as you’d expected. What can you do when your holiday videos are full of unexpected dramas, not-so-good surprises, or events out of your control?

Don’t ditch those videos, there may be a way to use them in your holiday memories, and sometimes events that you weren’t so keen on at the time, can turn out to be the most interesting, unusual or unique elements in your home movies. What seems like ‘bad’ video footage at first, can offer opportunities to get creative within your video editing, and getting creative is what makes better videos.

How to turn a holiday disaster into movie gold

Here’s an example from a video we edited, a trip to Europe which ran into problems while visiting France. Our client was taking a European holiday with their family in late 2018, and their trip included a visit to Paris.

Unfortunately, their holiday happened to coincide with the Gilet Jaunes protests (the Yellow Vests Movement, ongoing protests against wealth disparity). Unwittingly, they walked right into the middle of a standoff between protesters and police, that later turned into a full-blown riot. Crossing in between the police on one side, and the rioters on the other just before it all kicked off, they were fortunate enough to miss the actual riot, but the atmosphere was still very tense and scary.

Filming Disaster? Not at all!

Running into problems while on your trip doesn’t need to be the end of your travel movie, in fact sometimes what goes ‘wrong’ may be ‘right’ for your movie if you look at it from a different perspective. Our client asked if we could keep this section of their movie, and add the soundtrack ‘Bulls on Parade’ by Rage Against The Machine as a backdrop to highlight how scary it was running right into something so confronting.

We went a step further and suggested some chaotic distortion effects to amp-up the tension. Although they only took a tiny bit of footage (they weren’t going to hang around!) I was able to give this some extra ‘punch’ with some special effects to suit the tense atmosphere my client discribed. If you head over to our Travel Videos page, you’ll see a short piece of this in the banner video on that page.

For me, the chance to add this kind of creativity into an edit is what makes me love my job so much. The result was a fantastic and unexpected opener to their holiday movie.

When you find your filming didn’t quite turn out as planned before you leave that footage out of your edit, consider our client’s approach – instead of binning it, think about it first. Maybe you can turn it into a feature!

  • Thalia is the lead video editor at Sonic Eye video.