Dana Makes a Movie Part II: Shooting Videos with Toddlers

Today’s blog is about shooting video with a loose idea and the struggles I face when it comes to the subject matter, my toddler. Do you face any of these challenges? How do you work through it? I would love to know. Drop me a line in the comments.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Ready, Set, Action! (Sort of)

When it comes to recording a toddler, there are quite a few challenges that I am learning to deal with. Here are a few of them:

1. Distractions - As he gets older, he notices the phone more now and whenever I bring it out he wants to play with it or see himself (see below haha). This makes it difficult to capture him in the moment because it interrupts the recording. Work arounds? I think I can incorporate the footage of him interacting with me/the phone too. This is part of life with him and that should be part of the story.

2. “Mommy phone away” - Hooper is getting great at telling us what he wants now, which is fantastic but also he’s very demanding. He’s learning commands like “mommy sit” “daddy go away” or “mommy phone away”. I am mostly recording him on my phone because it’s the easiest way to get footage of him and I am able to pull it out and record when I need to. But I also don’t want to be the mom on her phone all the time so there’s a balance I’m trying to find with this. As much as I want to be recording all the time, if he wants the phone to go away, I am more than happy to do that for him to give him my full attention. Part of the parenting process is learning to be in the moment with him and that’s something I am working on. If it takes me months to get what I need, then so be it. As long as I keep going, that’s all that matters.

3. Having to be ready at a moments notice - this is why I use my phone. It’s hard to plan recording footage of a toddler. Sometimes all he wants to do is sit and read with me or have me play with him so when he does something that I think is cute and want to record it, I have to be super fast in the moment to capture it. All of this is happening on the fly and I’m trying my best to work with it and make it into something.


Footage so Far

Right now I have a loose idea of what I’d like to use this footage for, but I can’t see the whole video yet. My next idea is to record my husband and I interviewing each other about Hooper and see if that might give me a direction. We’ll save that for next week!

For now, here’s some of the footage I have shot so far!


What am I currently watching?

This week, I was out of town on a work trip and I got to see Twisters.

Overall, I thought Twisters was a fun summer movie, but it definitely missed the mark in a few places. They were using the Dorothy device in college with no explanation of where they got that from, Daisy’s mom is teased out and then revealed, which was disappointing. And where the hell is Brisket? If you’ve been following the Twisters press tour, you know that Glen Powell adopts the dog that he’s supposed to save in the movie. But we never see Brisket in the movie! So disappointing. And also no mention whatsoever of climate change. But besides those points, I thought it was entertaining.

That’s it for this week! Moving along with the video and still continuing to watch things in my spare time. Hope you all have a great week ahead. Thanks so much for everyone who has read this and sent a supporting message. It’s scary to put yourself out there, but we need to do more of it!

Keep going!!

Dana