the blue and the white being in the mountains is probably one of my favorite places to go each year we experiment with different ways and formats to capture our vision when we travel and at the moment we're sharing that content across platforms such as YouTube Instagram and Tik Tok all of which provide more eyes being seen on our work and hopefully more Brands and greater opportunities coming along with it so about a year ago I posted this video which got a total of 1.8 million views on Instagram and gave me a total of 7,000 followers
a few months then went by and a hotel located in Valen which is like another part of the three valleys in the French Alps they got in contact with me and said Ben we love your work we love the video that you posted we'd love for you to come and stay with us next ski season for like three or four nights and we'll cover like all of your stuff your transfer and your ski pass dinners each night everything like that in exchange for one so essentially we'll give you a free ski holiday to post one
20 second long video but there was no mention of like payment it was just we'll give you the free holiday and you can essentially make us one piece of content which then leads me to my next point and I know there's a lot of arguments on both sides of this but essentially working and offering your services for free from experience and I'm using that sort of like ski trip as an example if there is a hobby or an activity or a sport that you are really interested in and that you do often film and photography
can sometimes be like a catalyst into getting your foot in the door when it comes to that specific activity you might enjoy doing now you could argue with me and say Ben this is easy for you you have followers on Instagram you have like an entire portfolio to back this up so obviously brands are going to want to work with you now but if you think about it before I had any followers before I had like any sort of like platform I guess all I used to do was take pictures of sneakers cuz I was
interested in sneakers I think when I first started even posting on Instagram it was just Street Wear and sneakers for those of you that have been sticking around since those days and I remember I was taking photos of sneakers without getting paid I was literally doing work for free I was shooting like Nike shoes Adidas shoes I was essentially doing loads of free work just because I wanted to post like cool photos of sneakers on Instagram I think I hit like 9k followers and my first ever like sort of brand deal came through the door
with pummer and they off like ,200 at the time for me was loads of money I dropped out a uni and yeah I was like I've just made 1,200 by photographing some shoes all because I done loads of free work to build up like a mini portfolio on Instagram because I was just interested in sneakers so going back to my point I went on that ski trip I took that opportunity not just for myself but to build a bridge and build a relationship with that brand or in my case that hotel so that further down
the line if something comes up they might ask me back again to do more work for them and this time it could be paid so what I'm saying is don't devalue yourself obviously I believe your time is worth money but you do have to sort of like give a little to get a little back okay so now let's head over to the studio where I'm going to break down the full Instagram reel that I made from this trip welcome back to the desk ladies and gentlemen I think it's important when it comes to social media
to be able to adapt but without compromising who you are or your personal brand now what I mean by that is try not to chase virality in my opinion and the reason why I love posting videos like this is because I make YouTube content and this is a great way of just me posting sort of Snippets from that YouTube video on Instagram in a much more slow paced way in order to tell a story paying attention to composition is a massive massive thing when it comes to posting these types of reals which is why I
feel like I wanted to break this down properly for you guys to understand in this video if you are sort of like struggling or you've got content that you're sitting on but you don't really know what to do with it this is a great way of essentially repurposing that content so the actual reel itself is no longer than 12 seconds long and it is a accumulation of about 10 different frames and they're all static frames now the blue parts are obviously my clip and all the purple parts are my adjustment layer so my color grade
and then we've got the soundtrack which I've muted because it's copyrighted and then the bottom two are my sort of ambient sounds which I will speak about as I sort of kind of guide you guys along this reel the beginning part of your reel is hands down the most important because that is what is going to hook your viewers attention straight away so you've got at least a second or two seconds to essentially try and grab that viewer because you know people's attention spans at the moment are non-existent right so for the sake of this
real I've actually used three main components so my font color Choice my opening shot composition and matching my title sequence to the music so those are my three things that I've taken into consideration for this opening title sequence especially with my composition I've chosen that sort of blue background on top of this yellow bold font this sort of like soft yellow color because the blue and the yellow I think contrast really nicely together I actually follow an Instagram account called awesome color I'll leave it in the description and this account is really good just to
get an idea or understanding of what colors work really well together the opening three words so Bluebird day valter are obviously coming up on screen as the soundtrack is playing so they're all in B in that opening second you've already got a title of exact what you're going to be watching and the soundtrack is going to set that mood something else that you will notice are these two green soundtracks which is Ambience so when I go out and I record videos like this I will have my microphone on at all times just because if I'm
Vlogging obviously I want to talk to camera I want to pick up my audio but also there's no harm in just picking up audio Ambience just because it might come in useful if you take a look at my second frame this sets the scene this tells the viewer where I am it sets the scene of the en environment also you've got a mixture of motion in there because the snowboarder going past I think that adds a really nice touch of motion we've got a cool little sunflare at the top right which I've just noticed and
also I've used my grid to kind of give myself a bit of negative space I've done the same thing with my third shot when I've mounted the camera on the tripod and I stood there I wanted to wait for that gust of wind and then again you've got that really nice background view I've used negative space above my head so I've cropped my frame and I've zoomed in a little bit just to make myself seem small compar to the rest of the background so I kind of made a slight mistake in this video and I
wanted to leave it in just to show you guys sort of like what I mean it's not a huge mistake but it's something that I probably should have changed now as you can see this shot here at 6 seconds there are skis coming out of or coming off the ski lift on this like wooden Brown building obviously we've got the kind of contrasting colors with the sort of orange tone of the wood with the blue sky but then the next shot again is a brown building Blue Sky composed quite similar they're two next to each
other what I should have done is I should have moved this clip over of the skier in the red jacket I should have just swapped the two out so just move this one here and then move the other one across just so that both of these clips aren't basically similar and just sitting next to each other now this way once I've moved this one down as you can see flows just a little bit better maybe I should have moved it actually along one more just because I don't want two of the exact sort of same
shot next to one another choosing your different frames can really really impact the video in my opinion so you just want to make sure that the shots that you're choosing for your sequence are all quite diverse and you're not too putting too many of the same shot next to each other you'll notice as well each clip is on screen for no longer than a second just because I feel like this is a great sort of duration for each clip just because of the soundtrack The soundtrack's quite upbeat so having each clip about a second or
so is enough and after about 12 or 15 seconds of someone watching this video they can kind of establish what's going on on it doesn't need to be too much longer in my opinion now finally I'm going to cover the filming settings and what I use in order to get shots like this so for this entire sequence I actually used the Sony a74 all of these shots are filmed on the a74 with a mixture of three lenses which is the 16 to 35 24 to70 and a 35 mil 1.4 all paired with the same ND
filter the Pete McKinnon prist 2 to5 stop so it's a vnd and a mist and I shot all of these clips in 4k 24 frames in SL log 3 so that's all of my settings broke down and I also took a tripod up with me just having a little tripod with you at all times is just going to be better for you to capture either yourself in shot or just capture a guaranteed Ste frame thank you guys so much for watching hopefully you got something out of this video again you can apply what I've just
taught you or what I've spoken about to basically anything whether you're into film filming things in this way creating social content for yourself you never know what it can lead to at the end of the day that is going to be the best thing that you can do as long as you can constantly make content for yourself make content around something that you really really like you never know what can come of it at the end of the day so hopefully this video was helpful hopefully it gave you a bit of an insight as to
you know my process when it comes to editing reals or specific videos like this if you're a fan of this sort of style obviously let me know if there's anything you want me to cover going forward regarding you know how to do certain things when it comes to Instagram or just any suggestions would really appreciate it leave a comment DM me all of that good stuff and yeah thank you so much for watching if you did like this video don't forget to leave a like rate subscribe down below if you are new and I'll see
you guys in the next one peace [Music]
