HOW WE STARTED OUR TRAVEL & LIFESTYLE VLOG

As it stands, we’ve taken 10 trips abroad together! But the trip that inspired the birth of our travel vlog and blog? Well, that was the surprise birthday trip to Milan that Abi organised for Lulu in 2016.

We quickly came up with the name, Flights and Feelings, by grabbing the Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram handles (@flightsandfeelings), then improvised on Twitter since it was over the character limit (@flightsfeelings).

With the name agreed and decided, it was just a simple case of arranging our equipment for filming, deciding what we would vlog about, then finally: branding and editing our vlogs!

Equipment

Fortunately, we already had a laptop and a DSLR between us to use (Canon EOS T2i, with an 18-55mm lens), so the only additions required for our vlogger set-up was:

• a ring light; because all the YouTubers seem to have them,
• a cable; to connect our DSLR to the laptop so we could see ourselves while vlogging,
• an SD card; which had to be large enough to store lots and lots of video footage, and
• an external hard drive; because we didn’t need our laptop running out of space – there is literally nothing more annoying!

The above is the set up when we’re at home – for vlogging on the go we just use our phones (iPhone X, iPhone 7 and iPhone 6). Vlogging on our phones is extremely convenient in terms of saving us space when travelling and even for comforts’ sake – DSLR’s and all their many lenses are far too heavy to carry around from country to country, particularly if it’s only for a short trip – which we often take.

Content

If you’ve watched our vlog recapping our 2018, you’ll know that we have really struggled with vlogging on a regular basis. It’s not as easy as it looks – it has taken over a year and a half to get familiar and comfortable with iMovie, as well as requiring a lot of calendar planning between the two of us! On top of that, we work full time, so whilst we would love to be travelling here, there and everywhere all the time it’s just not realistic. So how have we decided what to vlog and when? It hasn’t been scientific, is the answer. Since launching our vlog we have taken two trips together abroad – Athens and Madrid. The other vlogs have largely been retrospective discussions about past trips, such as 10 Reasons We Love New York and Airline Dramas. We’ve decided this year (2019) that we’ll take it as it comes but aim to publish a new vlog at least once every two months – wish us luck!

Branding

Since starting in June 2017, our vlog has slowly changed appearance into what it looks like today. We didn’t make any announcements about the changes, instead opting to ‘quietly improve’ as we go along. At the moment, we have settled on our logo looking like this:

The major change from where we began is simply framing our text-based logo in a circle!

For our vlogs, we’ve settled on our #FLIGHTSANDFEELINGS shade of pink as a background colour wherever possible. This is a welcome change from the black and pink, ‘00’s grunge-pop look we started with initially! We can’t even say if this is how it will stay, but this is definitely the aesthetic for now. We’re pretty content with the white and light-grey theme on our blog, and just using our signature pink shade as an accent colour. We’ll aim to do a follow up post about the tools we use to brand our vlogs and blogs in due course.

Have you recently started a vlog or blog? Are you thinking about it? Don’t let people saying “the market is saturated” put you off! Let 2019 be the year you start your channel! Let us know how you get on – we’d love to hear about your journey and even help if we can.

Watch our latest #flightsandfeelings vlog here. Subscribe to our channel!

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We may include some affiliate links in our blog posts. If you purchase anything through these links you won’t pay more than you have to but we may get a small commission, which will help us fund the sweeties we like to eat on the plane.