By the time my daughter Marlowe turned two, we’d amassed more minutes of footage documenting her existence than everything Federico Fellini shot of anything in his entire career.

Worried that all this cute but quickly accumulating data was destined to become the digital equivalent of a hoarder house attic, Callie and I decided to try out a family project to focus our smartphone filming for our recent trip to Maine and Vermont to show Lowie leaves that actually change color and die – an event that is worthy of cross-continental travel for us seasonally undernourished Californians.

So instead of taking random snaps and weird snippets of video that begin three seconds after Marlowe just stopped doing something cute, I decided it would be fun to make a family video that’s a bit more “Terrence Malick” and structured around a repeated visual motif that would cut together in a fun, eye-catching way. “Let’s elevate our family videos!” I heroically declared to shrugs of excitement and collective yawns of awe.

The project began in earnest with a shot of Marlowe and Callie at Portland Head Lighthouse at one of those quarter-eating mounted binoculars (which Wikipedia tells me are called “tower viewers” and now I feel like I’ve accomplished something today). I walked around them with my iPhone and let the “tower viewer” (…but does any real human actually call them that?) wipe across the frame at both the beginning and end of the shot. Once I locked in on this simple visual motif – walking my iPhone from right to left and letting a foreground element like tree trunks, fence posts or the bodies of confused family members sweep across the frame at the beginning and end of a short moment – I was able to recreate it all over the place. After a few days, we wound up with an impressionistic series of interconnected moments that feel like a more accurate representation of our trip but is also (hopefully) more fun or engaging to watch for folks that aren’t my daughter’s parents. You can be the judge of how well it turned out by checking out the vid right here.

Other than using no professional film equipment beyond my (now outdated) iPhone 7, I also made sure that the edits were simple enough that you could do it in any basic video editing program without going into AfterEffects or hiring a VFX company in Mumbai to make the transitions between shots look cool. All I did was speed up a few frames here and there to better match the speed of my camera movement across shots and add some sound effects (which could be its own fun family project if you have slightly older kids by creating whooshes with paper towel rolls or hits with toy instruments). Callie and I were pretty stoked about the final product so we’ll definitely be doing more variations of this project for future trips. I’m sure all of you can think of your own versions too so why not get out there and make Fellini’s ghost proud!

- Chris