Note: The video embedded above is a pretty large download. If it takes too long to load for you, it’s also available on Vimeo.

Laura and I spent our fifth wedding anniversary in Maui, Hawaii. It was amazing. This was our second-ever trip to Hawaii, and I can’t imagine it’ll be our last: we had a lot of fun the first time, too.

I took my drone with me, naturally, along with my GoPro, and I think I got some pretty good videos out of them. Mix in some footage from my iPhone, add some music from Musicbed, and you get the video above.

I am so happy with how this turned out. I had been reviewing the footage even while we were still in Maui, and been messing with color correction just to see what I was working with, and I knew the images were good. But once I found the right song and started timing the cuts to the music, it instantly become something awesome.

It was a bit of a trick to get the video to line up with the music so closely, especially the fast cuts at 1:28 and 2:24. What I finally settled on was using the music file as the main storyline in Final Cut, and then placing the video in as attached storylines. That way, I could fine-tune specific cuts (like those two fast cut parts) and then leave them completely alone while I edit other parts.

I decided to go for a really wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1, so most of the footage actually has the top and bottom cropped out a bit. This actually turned out to be an advantage, because it meant I could do tricks like keyframing the vertical position of the crop, adding what looks like camera movement that wasn’t originally in the shot. You can see some examples of this in the first clip flying backwards over the beach, the shot pulling away from the boat at 2:22, and a few other spots if you’re looking closely.

Enjoy the video, hopefully it’s as fun to watch as it was to make.

PS: If you want to find out right away when I post new videos like this, you can follow me on Vimeo or Twitter. I also sometimes edit these videos to fit on Instagram, too.