Well we were gonna lead into this entry with some intro along the lines of “we have changed appearances several times over the years, and so has our blog.”
Then Greg put together a collage of pictures of us and he realized something…
When you wear the same 3 blue t-shirts for 3 years straight, well, it makes your “appearance” about as consistent as humanly possible.
Stuff the witty intro then!
Hey everyone, we’re changing up the blog!
When we started out on our journey we decided to carry video cameras, film the stuff that amused or intrigued us along with our thoughts on things, and post the results to a daily video blog.
And that’s what we pretty much did at first. When something happened, we filmed what we could and once a day we posted a single video in order to keep our friends and family updated on the fact we had not died…along with keeping record of all the adventures (both big and small) that we wound up on. Sometimes we would do a text entry, but it was pretty rare.
A few months into this adventure we realized the video blog wasn’t doing everything we wanted it too. Firstly, not every video made sense as a stand-alone entry without some explanation to provide context and lots of stories were simply not getting told because not everything translates well to our style of improvisational spur-of-the-moment video note taking.
It was at this point that we decided to change the format of the blog. To make entries revolving around themes and stories that we found as we traveled. The videos were still the backbone of the blog, but now they were augmented by text, pictures and stories that, we hoped, would provide a more clear total picture of our lives out here. We believed that this style of hybrid text/video/photo blogging would take more time per entry so to accommodate we reduced the total weekly entries from 5 to 2.
You all seemed to like the new format and we felt our memories were being better preserved in this fashion so we kept on doing it…
…for the past 2 years and 6 months…
Wow seriously? (**doing the math***) That’s like 243 entries!!
(little more actually, sometimes we posted extra stuff.)
…actually kinda proud of that…
What we have found now is that the entries have evolved without us consciously realizing it. Whereas when we started doing these, what we’ll call for a lack of a better term “hybrid entries”, we were still dong very simple videos. Now we’re creating edited compilation videos and putting that up on the blog. So whereas before a given video would take 10 minutes to upload and post now it can take as long as 8 hours to find all the related videos for a given topic, organize them, take the 30 minutes of relevant footage, watch it all, find the good bits, edit it down to about 90 seconds, produce it, compress it and post it. For example, those snowboarding videos were a massive time sink…they spanned 3 months of footage!
(lesson learned – there’s a reason Hollywood movies have a whole phase called “post production”)
Thing is, we like the compilation videos a lot more and think that they significantly increase the overall quality of the entries. At the same time the time investment is becoming a little too significant for each week.
In the interest of time and our desire to do more during our travels than sit in front of a laptop screen, we’re going to keep doing the “upgraded hybrid entries with compilation videos ” (gosh that sounds impressive 😉 and just drop back our publication schedule to Mondays.
So don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere….
Well, ok, we’re going places, obviously 😉
But we’ll be updating on Mondays now.
Greg and Tiffany are traveling around the world on sailing yachts and keep a video blog of their (mis)adventures. If sailing to Tahiti on a 44 ft sailboat, 3-day delays for wine tastings, getting pooped on by seagulls, opening coconuts with dull machetes, sailing past tornadoes and ukulele Christmas carols are for you, then check them out at www.CoastGuardCouple.com!
