Short and Sweet - 3 minutes or less

I keep my finished movies short, under 3 minutes and very rarely over 5 minutes. Yes, even for 2 week Florida 8-Theme Park vacations. Why am I so hung up with that 3-minute goal? Here are the reasons:

1. Reason #1. 3-minute movies are much faster to edit, to save, to render, to upload, to watch. I am a busy, time-pressed mother, wife, employee, entrepreneur, sister, friend, teacher, etc. I am too busy engaging in the moment to be spending all my time capturing the moment. If making movies is not fast, it's not sustainable. I'll end up with one Indie movie and be so burnt out by the experience I won't do another one the rest of the year.
2. Reason #2. Your audience has a short attention span. Yes, even loving, doting grandparents and aunts/uncles may not sit through long drawn out movies. It’s going to break your heart when they reach for that Fast Forward button. I can't overemphasize: Keep your movies short and sweet. When your movie is over, you want them begging for more, not sigh a huge relieve it’s Fiiiiiiinally over.
3. Reason #3. I share my movies mainly through the web and by email. Long movies take, er, long to upload, eat up bandwidth, plays back in coughs and spurts. Unnecessary trauma to your audience. Keep your movies 3 minutes or under.

But, you say, we spent a whole week in Florida visiting 5 Theme Parks. How do we condense all that footage into a 3 minute movie? You can do it. Here are some suggestions:

• Trim, trim, trim and trim some more. Keep your movie fast-paced. It’s a movie. It’s not a documentary or a journal. Keep the story tight and powerful. Take out anything and everything that drags the pace. Ten years from now when you watch the video, you will enjoy that variety and pace much more.
• Highlights only please. Your movie is not a brochure of the park. Let go the urge of documenting ALL the rides. Instead, focus and go deeper on a specifically memorable ride, for example, The Incredible Hulk Coaster ride. Videotape your excited kids buckling up, smiling and waving in confidence, then show the roller coaster ride barrelling down with kids screaming at the top of the lungs. Finish with a shot of them running out at the exit and yelling, 'Again, again!'
• Less video and more pictures. A series of 10 pictures takes about 30 seconds (3 seconds a picture). That series of 10 snapshots may cover more story than a 30 second video clip. I use this technique a lot. Sometimes, the last third of my movie is just still pictures, strung together elegantly with cool pans, zooms, transitions and exciting soundtrack of course.
• Minimize venue scenes. You may be awed by the Eiffel Tower in your Paris trip, but that Eiffel Tower is not going anywhere and shouldn’t take up 30 seconds in your movie as you video taped it from all angles. Capture people, capture expressions, capture moods, don’t waste precious movie time capturing buildings or monuments. A 3-second picture to set the context should suffice.
• Break it up. Creating three 2 or 3-minute finished videos is much faster (to edit, save, render, upload) then creating one 9-minute finished video. Split your long Europe vacation into smaller finished movies. An added bonus: your audience can pick and choose to watch the Venice portion of your trip, the Windsor Castle tour or the French Reviera.
• Get a photo album or a journal. That's right. Go to A.C. Moore or any art store and get a scrapbook or photo album where you can put all those pictures of scenes that didn’t make it into your video. There are other ways of cherishing precious memories other than home movies. Spread it out. Don't stuff it all into your home movies.

As you get more proficient in creating 3 minute finished movies, your video shooting skill will inevitably be sharpened as well. You become more adept at identifying what scenes to shoot, what scenes to skip, what scenes to relegate to the still picture in the first place. Because as you know, it is faster to turn 12 minutes of raw footage than it is to turn 2 hours of raw footage into a 3-minute finished movie.