INTRODUCING: The Abbey Archives

I’ve become OBSESSED with video recently (okay, I guess it isn’t a “super” recent obsession – this has been going on for about the last 10ish months).

I have always taken little videos of my kids. Whenever I catch them doing or saying something cute or silly or just being plain adorable, I try to snag a video. (Or a photo, sometimes the moment lends itself better to being photographed – you know what I mean!)

HOWEVER – up until this point, those videos have simply gone to the graveyard of “never to be seen again” land (can you relate?) I move them off of my phone & onto a hard drive – they’re backed up to the cloud – and they’re promptly forgotten about. They do resurface 1 year later in my “Amazon photos & videos memories”, but otherwise, I had no processes in place for going back & doing something with the videos I take (in contrast to the processes I have in place for the photos I take).

I am a PHOTOGRAPHER – so photos are my game. I write blog posts around my photos & create big, fat family yearbooks every year chronicling our family photos. But videos? I had no idea what to do with them! (Once, I actually burned a few disks with full, random clips of videos I’d taken on my iPhone – don’t ask me where those DVDs are, because I have no idea).

Last summer, I began actively vlogging our amusement park adventures (“The Adventuring Abbeys”) and I became utterly obsessed with seeing my children’s faces & hearing their little voices in VIDEO & AUDIO. Don’t get me wrong: photos are great (and will always be my first love) – but these videos were a whole new level of magic for me!

So, I created a system & a habit around my amusement park videos – but that still left me with the question of: what to do with all the little daily life videos I take?

Enter my newest project: The Abbey Archives.

My goal is to take all the little videos I take over the course of a month & create a short (my goal is less than 5 minutes long!) video of my favorite snippets. Think: like your old school family home movies – but better because the moments are curated & the best moments have been pulled out, while the “boring” moments are left behind. (You know what I’m talking about – you might take a 60-second video, but the last 15-seconds are the best part, where the first 45-seconds are just “fluff”.)

So, I did tried it for our month of February – and I have entered a new level of OBSESSION. Someone might need to come deflate me – because this is AWESOME! I know I’m kind of crazy over this right now, but I’ve watched this completed video at least 10 times – I just LOVE it!

I’m SO excited to have a place to finally chronicle my family videos & keep them safe & accessible – just like my photo albums.

If you’d like to follow along with my video-journey, hop over & subscribe to my YouTube channel! That’s where I post our amusement park vlogs, some wedding videos, and now – our monthly highlights!