Families looking to preserve their history on video should start filming during the holiday season rather than waiting for a major vacation, according to Greg Wasz, founder of the Cincinnati-based personal video venture Greg Wasz Productions. Wasz, who has spent years turning his own family's travel and holiday moments into finished videos, said the stretch between late November and the start of a new year gives families more reasons to pick up a camera than almost any other period on the calendar.
"Holidays bring people together in one place, often for the only time all year," Wasz said. "That alone makes it worth having a camera out."
Wasz said the instinct to film tends to surface on big trips, such as a week in Italy or a stay at Disney, while quieter moments at home over the holidays are skipped more often, even though they hold up just as well on screen. The most common mistake he sees is treating video as something reserved for vacations. A living room on Christmas morning, a grandparent telling a story at the table or children arguing over a board game do not look like "footage" in the moment, so nobody reaches for a phone.
"People save the camera for the big trip and miss everything that happens in between," he said. "Those in-between moments are usually the ones that matter most a few years later."
The implications reach beyond family archives. Holiday gatherings often include relatives who do not appear in footage the rest of the year, including grandparents, cousins and family members who live far away and may be in the same room only once annually. Wasz said that makes the holiday stretch a natural point to record them, simply because the opportunity will not repeat for another twelve months. For families weighing whether to begin a video habit, the window is narrow, and the people most worth recording are often the least likely to appear on camera otherwise.
Wasz approaches his own holiday and travel footage the way he treats any project for Greg Wasz Productions: he shoots more than he thinks he needs, then edits it down later. He said editing is where a pile of clips becomes something a family will actually sit down and watch together.
"Raw footage from a holiday is rarely interesting on its own," he said. "It's the editing that turns it into a story people want to watch again."
For his own family, that has meant building a habit of filming trips to places such as the Maldives, California and St. Barts alongside smaller moments at home, then combining them into something that holds together. He said the same approach works at any scale, whether the footage comes from a week abroad or a single evening around a table.
Wasz's suggestion for the new year is not a new piece of equipment or a different app but a change in what gets filmed in the first place. Families do not need to film everything to end up with something worth keeping, he said, and a few minutes of real moments captured without much planning often outlasts footage from an event staged for the camera.
As the year closes, Wasz said the families who end up with videos worth watching are usually the ones who started filming before they felt ready, not after they had a reason.
