At the end of June/ beginning of July I spent a week in the Yorkshire Dales. We were based in Starbotton in Upper Wharfedale, which is the location of one of my two One-Place Studies. Although this was a holiday, not a research trip, we managed to fit in several places of importance in my family history, and I went off most early evenings for a walk around Starbotton.

I meant to write something about how it felt to be in this village I’ve spent so many hours thinking about, and how just being there moved on my understanding of the place. Then, one evening as I wandered around, I realised that sense of connection and immediacy would best be communicated through a short video.

What started out as one woman with very little by way of plan standing on a hill above a village and talking into a phone while recording a static scene… eventually turned into downloading video editing software, inserting additional images, creating intro and outro pages and finally launching a YouTube channel. The sound is a bit dodgy in places – it was windy and my phone doesn’t have one of those big fluffy microphone covers! – so I had to learn how to do subtitles too. I also made the mistake of recording in profile, but hopefully the extra images will compensate for that.

You don’t need a YouTube account to watch, but if you do, please give me a ‘Like’. I enjoyed the process very much and suspect there will be another video, so if you’re feeling kind and you have a YouTube account you might also like to ‘Subscribe’ to my channel – it’s all free of charge of course; it just means I’ll show up in your list if I publish something else.

Any constructive feedback would be much appreciated, particularly if you know about bitspeeds, frames per second and the like. Ideally, I need someone to tell me what settings I need to use for my exact phone model when I ‘produce’ the final version as an MP4. But that aside, here it is. I’m pleased with it, and hope you like it too. 🙂