Six years late, my New Zealand drone footage finally made it into a film

TL;DR: I finally have a holiday video from a trip I took six and a half years ago. Claude did the editing using HyperFrames. I supplied the footage, two soundtracks and some opinions. Watch it here.

We went to New Zealand in February 2020, a few weeks before the world shut down. It was a road trip from the Canterbury high country up to the Abel Tasman coast. I took a drone and flew it everywhere I was allowed to. Then I got home, the footage went on a drive, and it stayed there.

The someday edit#

I did try. I started in DaVinci Resolve and spent an evening on colour balance, which is when I remembered that colour grading is a skill of its own and I don't have it. So I moved to iMovie, which is simpler, but it kept exporting my 2.7K footage at 1080p. That may have been my Mac and not iMovie. Either way I hadn't flown a drone halfway round the world to watch it in lower quality, so the project went back on the someday list.

Why I thought Claude could do it#

I've been using HyperFrames a lot recently. It's a framework for building videos as code, and Claude is very good at using it. I've mostly used it for brand work: point Claude at one of the brand pages I build for every site and it makes on-brand social videos from it. It exports in whatever format and quality I ask for. Editing is just a conversation. "Make that section shorter" and "that transition is too slow" are both valid instructions.

That was all motion graphics, though. This week I wanted to see if it could handle a pile of real footage and turn it into something I'd want to watch.

What I actually did#

I downloaded two soundtracks. For the intro I used an Irish whistle version of the Hobbit theme, because obviously. After that comes "Atlas New Zealand" by vadim_makes_sound, from Pixabay. I pointed Claude at the footage and asked for a holiday film.

It went through every clip before it made anything and wrote up a plan: the kinds of shots I had, the order of the trip, how it would move between them, and how it would cut them to the beat. It even lined the drop in the music up with our arrival in Mesopotamia. I read the plan, agreed with most of it and changed a few bits. Then it built the film.

The part I didn't expect was the locations. There are places in that footage I couldn't have named for you. Six years is a long time and a lot of New Zealand looks, in the best way, like more New Zealand. Claude pulled the location data out of each clip and put the right place names on screen. Mesopotamia Station, Lake Coleridge, Mount Oxford, Nelson Lakes, Split Apple Rock. Half of them I'd forgotten, and it was lovely to be reminded.

After some back and forth over pacing and which shots made the cut, I had:

A 4 minute 44 second film, cut from 170 shots, at full resolution

A trailer for the full film

Four 9:16 reels for social media: Mesopotamia, the lakes, Mount Oxford and Abel Tasman

What I took away#

The bit I'd been stuck on for years was never the creative part. It was the hours of sorting, grading, syncing and exporting between me and a finished video. Claude did all of that, and I was left doing the part I actually wanted to do: deciding what's good.

HyperFrames deserves a proper shoutout. It's become my default whenever I need a video, and footage I'd written off turned out to be one of the best uses I've found for it.

If you've got a drive full of holiday footage you keep meaning to edit, it doesn't have to wait another six years.

Watch the full film on YouTube →