Video Diaries - Movie Montage of my Peru Adventure!

These experiences I had are ones I will treasure and remember forever. But no matter how incredible, memories fade and detailed pictures become fragmented moments blurred by time. It is one of the beauties of travel and adventure, especially in my youth, but I also know that I have to work to keep these memories alive. I do this in many ways, capturing experiences from a wide range of mediums so that someday I can have a roadmap of bits and pieces bringing back the whole. I journaled every day of my trip, writing my thoughts, experiences, and emotions of the day. I scrapbooked everything I could find – wrappers, receipts, brochures, magazines, and anything else. I captured my time through photos, both artistic intentional photography and spontaneous moments of video and photo that I compiled on my phone. 

One special way I have been documenting my life is through a practice I began this last year that I have dubbed ‘video diaries’ – resting my phone against something and simply talking to the camera. They have become something I hold dear to my heart, a unique way to capture a moment in its purest form. They are entirely unscripted, unplanned, honest, and spontaneous in the best way. It is not a performance, which is why I don’t call them vlogs, and I am truly making them for myself just as a documentation of my life. I keep them in an album on my phone and I find that when I rewatch them, sometimes only weeks later, I remember so much more about that day or moment and can observe and reflect on so many new things. I have three favorites that stick out to me as the reason I do this practice and as artifacts I look forward to watching far in the future or showing my future children. The first one is actually a five part series and the thing that started this whole practice for me in a very unintentional way. I was in Maui this past December with my best friend Lilly and we were going surfing (my first time ever and as someone who is a bit scared of waves, I was slightly apprehensive at what the experience would entail). After driving around for a bit and multiple phone calls with our surf instructor, we finally found the right beach. For some reason, as we were putting on sunscreen, I propped my phone up in the trunk of the car and started a video. We laughed about how white the reef-safe sunscreen made our legs and a quote of mine that I pulled out upon rewatching it goes “it's very windy so that’s a smidge unnerving but the waves are very small so maybe I’ll live” – a random description of exactly how I felt in that moment. Upon returning to the car after surfing (which I absolutely loved), I again set the phone down and for two minutes we chatted and told the story of our surfing experience. The saga later continued when we realized we had gotten extremely sunburned on the backs of our legs (despite the copious amounts of reef-safe sunscreen) and we documented the process of spraying ourselves with vinegar, a suggestion from the internet to calm sunburns. I love these videos because of the practice I built after rewatching them and realizing how hilarious they were and all of the fun anecdotes and conversations that they captured. The second video I cherish deeply was taken when I went to Bozeman, Montana with my best friends Chloe and Reece on our first night at our AirBNB. For me, the beauty of this video is the fact that we forgot the camera was there and it ended up capturing a few minutes of laughter and conversation with my dear friends, something I had never been able to rewatch or experience externally. The third video (though there are so many more that I love and cherish) is a 6 minute video I took when  Reece and I were driving back from decorating our graduation caps the night before we graduated. This video was able to capture what so much else couldn't during that important time in my life. In a week where I was too busy to sit and journal, and even when I did the words simply couldn’t come because what I was experiencing was so surreal and that frustrated me because I knew how special and transformative that time was and my inability to capture every minute and feeling made me feel lost and nostalgic for the moments I knew I would forget. But what I found in that video was that I did actually have the words, that sitting there in the dark next to one of my favorite people in the world who was also going through the same moment in her life brought out every bit of emotion and memory I had been struggling to capture. The conflicting feelings I felt surrounding the transition – leaving my high school memories behind but looking towards a very exciting future – made total sense, despite the confusion I had felt when trying to put it to paper. I learned that when my pen doesn’t have to keep up with my brain it can capture things in a different and real way and sometimes the depth of a moment can be missed until it is seen externally. Writing is something I adore and that helps me experience things more deeply but with that video I realized that while there are some moments when choosing each word with the intentionality writing requires clarifies and strengthens my thinking, there are other times when it cannot capture the scope of a moment in its most complex, often confusing, and authentic way. That is why I have this practice – to capture what the pen cannot, to rewatch and reflect on profound moments of joy, friendship, introspection, and observation. 

Because of this practice I hold to capture memory, the incredible photos and videos I took, and as a way to share my incredible adventure with other people, I created a movie montage of my summer in Peru! I combined photos, videos, and music to try to capture some of the feelings and memories from my adventure in a fun and creative way. While there are a few clips from video diaries sprinkled in, most of my video diaries are quite long and move at a much slower pace than an upbeat montage requires.  

Watch Here: https://youtu.be/orRTpBFM0xQ