Mexico: Mayan Mystery and Marine Majesty {Guest Blog + Documentary Film}
{Photo credit: Greg and Felicity}
UPDATED: 2/5/2023
[Hi, Lindsey here - welcome to our first guest blog post from the amazing and talented Greg + Felicity, another traveling couple! This British duo created a fascinating documentary film of their month-long honeymoon to Mexico, where they explored the country’s Mayan ruins and had adventures in the jungle and then headed to the coast for sea life, which they captured with beautiful videography. Their documentary is a perfect balance of humor, history, wildlife, and culture. We can’t wait to see future travel documentaries from this couple, and we now find ourselves wanting to plan our own Mexican travel adventure! Without further ado, read below for Greg’s guest blog that covers the behind-the-scenes making of their documentary and an overview of their adventures. If you want to skip straight to the 58-minute film, scroll to the bottom.]
First of all let me say a huge thank you to Dustin and Lindsey for kindly allowing us to submit a ‘guest post’ to their wonderful blog. As a fellow travelling couple, we enjoy reading about their travels, and being part of the larger travel community.
Documentarians Greg and Felicity on their Mexican adventure. {Photo credit: Greg and Felicity}
Secondly, I had better offer up a quick introduction of who we are. I am Greg, a professional comedy performer, juggler and magician, and my wife, Felicity (who we refer to as Lady Felicity in all public settings for reasons lost to the sands of time), is a professional fossil hunter. This year we have entered the world of travel documentary making, with our journey beginning in Mexico.
Our first 58 minute long documentary, ‘Mexico: Mayan Mystery and Marine Majesty’ is a slightly odd entrance into travel documentary making in that it was never originally intended to be a documentary when we set out. I’m going to be discussing some of the ‘making of’ here, so it is time for you to decide whether you go and watch it now, or whether you would prefer to read on and watch it later. Either way is fine with me – if you want to watch it now then please go ahead – I’ll just wait here for you.
At this point in time you may be wondering how we managed to start filming a documentary without even realising that we were doing it. It begins with us arriving in Mexico in February this year, where we were beginning a month-long journey across the country for our honeymoon, having ‘tied the knot’ in June 2018.
I have been involved in video making for a long time. I have produced a number of short videos, including a Steampunk web series, and so when we were going on an adventure of this scale I hadn’t skimped when it came to packing cameras. We had a camcorder and three action cameras (one Go-Pro and two Crosstour cameras) with us, as well as our iPhone cameras as additions. These were intended initially purely to film a record of our honeymoon for ourselves.
I would strongly recommend that anyone who gets the opportunity goes to visit this ruin. Many people who visit Mexico and see a Mayan ruin will not get beyond Chichen Itza or Tulum, both of which we found far too tourist filled and slightly sad in their commercialism. Make the effort to go and see some of the others, however, and they will not disappoint. To sit on the Pyramid of the Moon, and look down the Street of the Dead with temples and dwellings rising on either side, and to try to image the street filled with the lives of the ancients, or even to imagine the structures being built by the people who once inhabited the city without any modern machinery – and almost certainly without even the wheel – is at once both humbling and awe inspiring.
Tarzan or Greg: you be the judge! {Photo credit: Greg and Felicity}
Yet this is also the place we visited to which I feel our video does least credit. The gap between how incredible the place was, and our footage of it, falls apart because that day I only took one of the action cameras out of the car and not our main camcorder. I was aware of the heat and altitude, and of not wanting to carry anything bigger than we needed. Had I known that we were going to use the footage in a video to be made public I would definitely have made a very different choice.
Felicity swimming with sea lions {Photo credit: Greg and Felicity}
It was as we moved around from ruin to ruin, from the well cleared fenced off ruins at El Tajin, to actually getting to walk through unexcavated ruins in the jungles around the main archaeological site of Palenque (and I got the opportunity to swing, Tarzan style, from a vine), that I began to think about all of the sights we were seeing, and all of the footage which was filling my camera, and I realised that we had something which was worth sharing with more than just our immediate friends and family.
While I have mentioned Palenque, I ought to point out that this was one of our big gambles and successes of the Honeymoon (following one of the low points when we found out that the ‘private family bungalow’ we had booked turned out to be a room above a restaurant with holes in the floors and walls, and led to a middle-of-the-night search for new accommodation), when we decided on the spur of the moment to spend a little extra on a tour guide to go out into the jungles. If you are visiting Palenque, be sure to do it! The archaeological zone itself is well worth a visit, but is was the chance to see the ruins in the jungle as they were first discovered which really gives these particular Mayan ruins a special place in my memories.
From around the end of the Mayan section of the tour, and certainly before we reached the grey whales of Magdalena Bay or the whale sharks of La Paz , we knew that we were going to be editing the footage together into a documentary. Perhaps you can tell the difference when you watch it, but aside from us being sure to have exactly the right camera with us each day, I hope not. With the edit of this video, and with the travel videos we currently now have in pre-production, I hope that we can take you along with us on our adventures, and not leave you feeling that anything is ‘scripted’ while we are out travelling.
In the video this can be most clearly seen on day one, when we visited the incredible ruins of Teotihuacan . This ancient Mesoamerican city, even though only a small percentage of it remains, was a perfect introduction to the country. At an altitude of over 7000 feet, we quickly have to get used to the lack of air as we climbed up the structures of the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, amongst others.
[Lindsey again] As professional photographers ourselves, we were interested in learning about the equipment Greg and Felicity used to film and edit their documentary. Here’s what they used:
- a pair of Crosstour Action Camera CT7000s - a current version of this camera is here
- GoPro Hero
- Panansonic HC-VX980 camcorder
- two iPhone SEs
- For editing: various elements from the Adobe Creative Cloud range of applications
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Check out our other posts about Mexico:
