Turning ten years of hiking films into short videos
Approved seven animated map videos, started unzipping 1.2 TB of my original films inside Google, and shelved a newsletter before sending it.
I make long films about hiking alone, mostly for YouTube. Over the last ten years that's added up to about 250 films. This fall the big project is giving all of them a second life as short vertical videos and posting those everywhere: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and Facebook. Each long film can become many shorts.
I'm doing it with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, and KraigOS, a system Claude and I built this fall. KraigOS is one database of my projects, videos and every post, plus a few programs that run around the clock in the cloud. Claude reads and updates it as we work, so every short, which film it came from and where it's been posted are all tracked in one place.
This journal is a daily record of that work. Claude drafts each entry at night from what we actually did, and I go over it before it goes up. Here's Thursday, October 8.
Why the posting matters right now. Two platforms are pushing new creators to post a lot. TikTok's Creator Growth Challenge asks for a set number of posts each week that pass 1,000 views (week one is done), and Facebook has a similar program for Reels. Both reward volume, so they're a good place to test which kinds of shorts work before I put them on Instagram and YouTube, where I'm more careful about posting the same thing over and over.
The map videos. One format we're testing is an animated route map. For each long hike, Claude builds a vertical video: the top half is a map that draws my route day by day, and the bottom half plays clips from the film at that point in the hike. The newest version also zooms into one part of each hike in 3D. On the Salkantay Trek in Peru it's the last morning, the trail climbing from the town of Aguas Calientes up to Machu Picchu. On K2 Base Camp it's Concordia, where the glaciers meet and K2 comes into view.
I watched eight of these today and approved seven. The one for Acatenango, a volcano hike in Guatemala, still doesn't feel right. The map is too flat for a hike that's all about two volcanoes, so it's being redone with a tilted camera and satellite imagery. I also tried a different opening on the Big Bend one: instead of the trail name over the map, it started on my best shot from the hike with a line like "The best hike in Texas." I didn't like it, so the map stays first.
Other formats. We tried a few more. A one-card summary of a whole trail didn't work. A question-and-answer format felt too niche. So instead we're copying formats that already work for other creators: a quick reel of moments from across all my trips that felt unreal (the first version is made), and an Instagram carousel of my trip to the Lofoten Islands in Norway.
Why I'm downloading my whole channel. To make good shorts you need the best copy of each film. What YouTube plays back is re-compressed, so it isn't the best copy to cut from. Google Takeout, Google's tool for downloading your own data, is delivering the original file of almost everything I've uploaded since 2016 to my Google Drive: about 1.2 terabytes in zip files, with a few parts still on the way. Once they're unzipped, every film sits in its own trip folder, and the shorts, a new three-hour ambient hiking compilation I'm working on for later this year, and anything else can be cut from the original.
Unzipping that through my laptop would take weeks, because Drive only feeds files to the Mac at a couple of megabytes a second. So Claude wrote a small program that runs on Google's own computers (Colab) and unzips each film straight into its folder in Drive. The first film went through at about 47 MB a second, and the rest runs overnight. Along the way we found Google had delivered about 300 GB of the same files twice, so those are gone, and I cleared about 100 GB of Final Cut render files off the laptop.
The newsletter I didn't send. A few thousand people have signed up for email updates on my website over the years, and I've never actually sent them anything. Claude designed a first issue this morning. Then we ran into a rule I didn't know about: every marketing email in the US has to include a physical mailing address, which for me would mean paying for a virtual mailbox. Instead of doing that just to test an idea, I'm going to try ideas as single posts on X first and come back to email later.
Back on X. We got posting to X working through its API, so Claude can post for me. The first post was a 30-second clip of the K2 map video. The plan is one post a day, always with a video, an image or a link.
A sponsored film. Part of the morning was in Final Cut, working on a sponsored travel film that's due this week. I can't say more about that one yet.
This journal. The last thing today was setting this up. Every night Claude writes an entry like this one from what we worked on, and I go over it before it goes up. Mostly I want a record of what building all this looks like day to day.
What I learned. For these map videos, the map is a better opening than my best shot. And when a big file job is slow on my laptop, it can usually run on Google's computers, next to the files, much faster.
What's next. The rest of the films unzip overnight. The Acatenango video gets its new version. More posts go out for week two of the TikTok challenge. And the journal page on this site gets designed, so these entries have somewhere to live.