Hello Nate Woodburry here. Welcome to Hero TV. I'm here in Capitol Reef
National Park. We're going to be talking about how to start a travel vlog or blog
and later this afternoon, we're actually going to meet up with one of my favorite
travel vloggers. They're called "less junk more journey"
They live in an RV and they
travel all over the country. We're going to meet up with them later this
afternoon but first we're here and we're going to hike Hickman Arch. I'll show
you real quick
Alright we made it. This is the Hickman
bridge. Great hike, mile up, having a lot of fun. Good we came here on a cool day
Now we're going to head down and go meet with Nathan and Marissa and Henzy from
less junk more journey.
I'm excited I'm here with you guys!
I enjoyed watching your your adventures and your travels and so when
we come to the topic of how to start a travel vlog, found you guys. And when I
know that, knew that you're in Utah, like let's see if we can connect. So I
guess the first question is, if somebody asked you, well how do I start? how do I
start a travel vlof? blog? what would you guys say?
Well the vlog part is how
we started more than the blogging. I would say you start with what you got
When we started all we had was an iPhone and then I think I end up getting
a GoPro 4 a little bit after that. But I really just started with an iPhone. You
just start with what you got and get experienced and I got a look in a feel
from what I like to do and what I thought looked good and what's felt
natural for our selves it is and just film film film film! until you get a feel
for it. It's a lot of practice. Yeah, in the beginning we were super
awkward. If you, when you're filming yourself for the first time and you're
in public or I was even embarrassed in front of you. I would be like, here let me
stand when you go back there so it just took time really.
Well one of the worst
things if you haven't done a lot of filming, to me one of the worst things
that could happen is to almost to be a one-hit wonder. It sounds like a good
thing like you get your 10 minutes of fame. But if you if you're really
terrible at it, they'll come back and watch your second
video and they'll all leave. So it's almost good like you don't want a huge crowd
watching at the beginning while you get that experience in. So I think it's fair
it's fair that you just kind of earn your keep. I mean our first six months they're
pretty rough.We don't refer to them very often
are they still, are they still live?
oh they're out there, like hey go check out our second video
we ever made.
We were just scared.
Yeah!
we've gotten used to the cameras a little bit more. We still get embarrassed
how long has it been then?
ahh...
year and a half? I think on YouTube we've,
we've been living in an RV for two years and then on YouTube a year and a half
So how far in advance will you guys plan your travel and your destinations?
We uhm,
We know the area we're going to. Sometimes up to a year in advance
but usually at least three to six months in advance, we know the area like what
part of the United States we're moving to, the states we're going to hit maybe
one major destinations. But as far as knowing like exactly where we're going
to stay? like what campground? or when exactly that's going to be? like it's
kind of scary but we really don't plan down to the day. Like right now, where
we're at right now, like we haven't booked anything for like next week so we
don't even know where we'll be exactly next week we just know the area. I think
we've done it both ways when we first started we had every single thing booked
out which is really nice because you don't have to worry about, you know, where
you're going to stay. If you want specific campgrounds then you do need to
have reservations far in advance but then we notice that we, you know, what if
we had a week of bad weather? you know and then we didn't get to do stuff in
that area as long as we liked? or what if we met another family we wanted to
spend more time with? or like we kind of kept getting these roadblocks and we're
like, "oh we're so locked down" when you've got all these reservations so that's
when we just decided that the flexibility was worth maybe not knowing
exactly or not getting into that specific campground that we wanted and
that's worked good for us.
It's a good balance of kind of knowing where we're
going but not knowing exactly where we're staying. But it took us a while to
get there. At the beginning we weren't comfortable doing that because the whole
the whole RVing thing was overwhelming to start with so that was enough we're
like, we don't wanna worry about where we're going to sleep at night we already
got enough stuff to worry about what everything else we're learning.
Alright so a big question is what you guys do about Internet on the road especially
when you have to upload a large file to YouTube or something like that? how do
you do that?
Well they started a lot of your cell phone companies have what they
call unlimited plans and I use the quotations because they're not actually
unlimited for the most part because once you use a certain amount of data they
start they make you low priority. Which means, there's different ways it's really
technical but basically they say unlimited but once you get to a certain
point they make your speed super slow and so if you can like maybe check your
email but if you ever want to upload a video and all that those are limited
plans are really tough to use. So we actually, we started rather than get one
of those kind of and we'd heard about Verizon used to
have a real unlimited plan where you can use as much data as you wanted and they
never cap you. Well they stopped doing that because obviously. Probably not a
good idea but you can still buy those old unlimited plans. At the time when we
did it if you had a business which we did, you could buy it as a business from
somebody and transfer from one business account to the other and so we bought an
old grandfather Verizon unlimited data plan and transferred it to ourselves and
paid like a middleman to help because it sounds easy but if you're doing anything
with Verizon it's not. They push the wrong button you lose the unlimited you
know so, you go, I had a middleman I didn't care to pay him a little bit to
help make sure that transfer went smoothly when we bought that plan.
So that's what we still got. Now Verizon has started cracking down on
that a little bit so we try to keep it at a reasonable amount like 100, 200 gig
something like that. Which sounds like a crazy amount but we use like 60, 80 gigs
just uploading video sometimes. So I mean that's, that's a great question because
if you've got a 10gig account and it takes you 80 gigs to upload your videos
Does that even work in a location like this? like you've got strong enough
signal?
It works here. Yeah we have a booster antenna on top of the RV that
brings in more the signal. It'll bring us from like say we have 3G it'll give us
like up to maybe one bar, two bar of 4G or if we have one bar 3G you know it kind
of gives you that 1 or 2 bar boost which is a big deal in some areas you can open
one bar where you can only text to 3G where you can maybe at least to a little
bit on the internet and so the more remote areas it does get tougher. We try
to work around that and using our antenna and stuff. If we're going to a
spot that we know has a little of no internet we'll have to like batch our
videos ahead of time or something and try to schedule them to upload or
something like that. So you have to kind of watch what area we're going it or we
drove around looking for
signal before.
You look for star but
if you're in a remote area that doesn't have internet, there's probably not a
Starbucks to start with. You're stuck like driving around like, I don't know I found a
bowling alley one time and I don't know it's not fun to that point.
It does happen sometimes
Because when we watch, we don't see you struggling
Yeah it's super easy it's fun there's nothing going wrong.
Well it doesn't happen very often.
No, yeah, we've gotten
better. The boosters helped and paying attention to the signal in the areas
helped. We just look ahead of time like you saying if we kind of do our research and
check and see if it's going to have any service and then he'll kind of work on
the videos in here.
It's a lot of stuff like we didn't think about it or
know to doto start with and we've kind of hopefully you learn from your
mistakes as you go along. We don't have to drop out too often but
every once in a while we had an interview with somebody and we
had to drive to a, it was a pretty overlook at least in Grand Canyon there
wasn't much internet. But we found one little spot is like an overlook over the
canyon so we had to drive to there and spend an hour there and stuff doing that
so it still happens.
And that's how we do it. I mean other people do it other ways
we can talk about the other ways too but that's only the internet you can do you
you can rent a line 450 bucks a month. if you want to.
What do you mean?
Well there's guys that own these
unlimited lines and they'll actually sell lines under them. We bought our own
We owned our line and it's more expensive. It's 150 bucks a month but if Verizon
decide to clamp down your line which the thing is like usually being out of
contracts a good thing but it's a bad thing in our case because that means
Verizon can say next month you no longer my customer and I can't do anything
about it. So you actually want to be in contract when it comes to these I
unlimited plans which sounds weird but
yeah so we try not to
Now let's talk about your
filming style and kind of you've probably evolved over time but you do a
lot of time lapses, you do a lot of
well obviously you must
be strategic where you set up your camera and then you'll watch I
experimented with some of that alright? Set up the camera and then walk by it
then go back and get it. So talk to us about some tips you share there and some
of the things that you do to create your vlogs.
Well I'll start by saying I think
a lot of, there's really not much that's original as far as filming. Like now
there's originality as far as how people piece together what they've seen other
people do with filming but a lot of your angles and then beat and the music and
the you know, for the most part a lot of it's been
done. So I think it's a good idea, you know? You try to find your own style but
at the same time you're starting off you may not have a clue what your style
needs to be. So I think it's okay to watch other vloggers and see what styles
you like. I may not do a total blatant copy of what they're doing but see what
what fits your feel for what you're doing
see what you like and why you like it. we'll watch things and why do we
like that? is it the music? you know how I do certain things
and you think of your
audience and kind of what they like. We started off, when we start our
channel I used a lot of, the music I use is pretty upbeat
in modern but they had a lot of like it's called a just what is the
music called?
Anyways the style of music had a lot of
like I guess I call it screaming? it's not like heavy metal or anything like
that and like a lot of hot pants and a lot of skip beating to it and stuff
like that and our audience was like, I had to turn your music down you know there
was just too much for me in this mess. You got to listen your audience and kind
of know who you're trying to target and keep that in mind too with your filming
style too. I think starting off it's more important just to do what you love and
feel it out but there's that blend of figuring out what may or may not be a
good fit for your audience and so we kind of adapted our flow to, to our
audience as well as time is going on and yeah it takes time. People don't realize
I mean silverhawks. I mean I've, haven't hacked a, I almost twice
I mean you know because you're going up you're setting it up you're coming back
and you're walking and you're turning around and jumping on the rocks
That really high angle you see of Marissa walking hundred feet in
the distance I mean at some point, I got to catch up to her on the train and
there's a you know, so it's, it's funny when you really sit there and think about some of
the angles I guess or shots and stuff.
I have another follow-up but I was thinking
and then I started visualizing you up on the rocks.
It's good exercise though and that's
usually why she's carrying his and I'm not because I'm hopping around yeah
I get a hard time for that on the trails in person too so..
well I enjoy it
He offers but our audience gives him a hard time because he doesn't
carry anything
We'll just tell people you're carrying a Red
Yeah yeah I got the Red camera yes.
So I mean it makes a big difference
because I've seen on some blogs they'll say, okay now we're going to go do this
and they just keep carrying the camera it's one solid stream. Where as I know I
saw recently on one of your episodes, whether you got an event I don't
remember exactly but I it was like a two second shot here two seconds here
different angle here and it just kept moving so much but we're so used to that
that we don't realize it's just it for us it's all one picture but it's totally
captivating so it takes a lot of work.
It's a lot of editing yeah. 3 - 5
thirty-five hours of editing on each video depending on how much video it is
and that's, that's why I include the upload time and all that too but, but
yeah there's days where I've had to get two videos in the day and it's like a
whole day of sitting there and editing non stop. It starts to hurt but I'd even,
like, we first started I would do three to five second clips and then over time
I don't know if it's just what kind of evolved or what but the clips have gotten, I also
ever get the one second clips or what it's like I've gotten shorter shorter
like people's attention span is getting shorter and shorter so you have to edit
faster and faster. Again you're just kind of work into the audience and work into
the field of video.
So when you're filming that you're just thinking, okay
and I've just got to get a lot of different angles and so you're in one
spot for a while and a lot of
yeah I'm thinking ahead. I'm thinking ahead if I
need four to six shots at certain four to six different angles and then I know
when we're going to talk next and what we're going to talk about if I know
we're going to talk about just talking about a certain thing I'm already
looking for angles and maybe have to do with what we're going to talk about or
something like that so I do try think to ahead.
And before at the beginning of the day if I can I mean it's all about it's
about story with the videos too. I mean if you don't just go out and you know
just show, hey you know here's my dog, is my cat you know? you got to think ahead
of what the story's going to be.
Or you'll even say what we learned or what
are we doing today and how could that help other people and so we try to come
up with a storyline on what would we like to know if we were watching the
video. That's been helpful and it's a vlog and it's really off there's no way
to know exactly what's going to happen and sometimes I think of videos going to
go one direction and it doesn't because we have a toddler
Our toddler may take it a whole different direction but you at least, I think it's a good
idea to at least try to know if we're going to a certain location with
something happening maybe I can find a story before we go that I
think will kind of revolve around where we're going and what we're doing. I'm not
trying to look for that at least.
Well I found that so it's like, helpful
as well like for somebody that's going to go to a certain place or somebody
that's going to get an RV or a certain type you make them educational and yeah
we just thought we wanted that blend some of them just I think the
personalities are so entertaining they could do whatever they want honestly
it's just an entertaining video but we know that we're, we are, we're
not entertaining.
I was trying to think of a nicer way to say we do lean
more toward the informational side. I want people to learn something to be
motivated to do something not just get entertainment value out of it so I do
try to give information as well but you can do information overload to the point
that it's the boring they won't learn or do anything either so it's a tough
balance to have that in between.
I think we just try to be real
and like share everything and I think that's what how the feedback we've
gotten from our audience is what they appreciate is that they feel like we're
honest and down to earth and you know we open up everything in our life and I think
that, that can be helpful more relatable at time.
Got a random question
but most, most other vloggers get it have the drone. They get into the drone flying
you guys thinking about that or trying to stay away from that?
Uh, we got one but
we don't get to fly near as often as we'd like because what you learn is as
you get out like most your state parks is a no no, most your national parks is a
no no. I mean cities a no no. There's so many regulations of where you
can
What about Casey Neistat?
Did something happen to him?
He's under review
at the FAA or whatever.
Did he do it again? and make a matter?
No he says,
he said just recently, he said, I'm not going to fly it in the city
because I'm under review of FAA right now and I've got to do this new drone
review so let's go to a place where I can fly it.
He just yeah
He pushed the limits on it.
and I think the worst part of that is people try to mimic what he did
His shots were awesome.
He's incredible to see. It's stiff you don't get
to see.
I mean we'll be places more like, oh it would be so beautiful if we could
use the drone but I mean and you have to think about being in an RV most of the
places we're traveling to are state national parks. Your monuments
because that's where the beauty is
That's just not allowed.
This actually where
we're parked right now we're just outside the National Park on BLM this we
had we actually can fly where we're at right now. It's like the first time,
it's almost two months I mean it's because we're going from those places
we've been staying in the parks.
We do plan on trying to launch from here out
on a cliff yeah but yeah it's, it's tricky. It's a lot tricky. People don't think
about that when they get a drone. If you want to keep it legal it's tough
So
I've been following as you're going around to all the different national
parks over here did you guys have a goal to go to every national park in the
country? or
We like to. I don't think we've officially made it a goal but I
think
I'm officially making it
Ok.
Well the only tricky parts are Alaska and Hawaii. You've
got national parks about those states those are the tricky parts.It's as if it's
continental 48. I mean that's great you know but we do. We plan on getting all
the national parks. It'd be hard to do in the RV. Well the ones in Alaska by said
some of when we have to like take a boat or take a plane.
So yeah it won't be
an easy feat but I think yeah they'll probably like add a bunch. I don't know
how long it'll take. What is there? 59 now?
I looked it up the other day just
cause I was curious of what percentage of them were in Utah I guess there's 5 in Utah
out of like at 50, 59?
the high fifties.
We done
we done 20 something I think so far. Some around there maybe almost almost getting
close to halfway outside.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode and learned a lot
from Nathan and Marissa. Thanks so much for taking sometime
Thanks for sharing your experience.
So remember to live on purpose, make a difference,
and be the hero.