As families gather for the holidays, a Cincinnati-based video producer is urging them to look beyond vacations and special events when deciding what to record. Greg Wasz, founder of Greg Wasz Productions, says the stretch from late November through the start of a new year provides more natural opportunities for family filming than almost any other time on the calendar.
“Holidays bring people together in one place, often for the only time all year,” Wasz said. “That alone makes it worth having a camera out.”
Wasz, who has spent years editing his own family’s travel and holiday footage into finished videos, points out that the instinct to film tends to appear on big trips—a week in Italy or a stay at Disney—while quieter moments at home are skipped more often, even though they hold up just as well on screen.
The most common mistake he sees is treating video as something reserved for vacations. A living room on Christmas morning, a grandparent telling a story at the table, or kids arguing over a board game may not look like “footage” in the moment, so nobody reaches for a phone.
“People save the camera for the big trip and miss everything that happens in between,” Wasz said. “Those in-between moments are usually the ones that matter most a few years later.”
Holiday gatherings also bring together family members who may not appear in footage the rest of the year. Grandparents, cousins, and relatives who live far away might only be in the same room once annually, making the holiday stretch a natural point to record them simply because the opportunity will not repeat for another twelve months.
Wasz treats his own holiday and travel footage the way he treats any project: he shoots more than he thinks he needs, then edits down later. He says editing is where a pile of clips becomes something a family will actually sit down and watch together.
“Raw footage from a holiday is rarely interesting on its own,” he said. “It’s the editing that turns it into a story people want to watch again.”
For his own family, that has meant building a habit of filming trips to places like the Maldives, California, and St. Barts alongside smaller moments at home, then combining them later into something that holds together. He says the same approach works at any scale, whether the footage comes from a week abroad or a single evening around a table.
As the calendar turns, Wasz suggests families change what they film rather than buying new equipment or downloading a different app. A holiday dinner or a quiet afternoon at home is enough, he says, and a few minutes of real moments captured without much planning often outlasts footage from an event staged for the camera.
“Start with what’s already happening instead of waiting for a big event,” Wasz said. The families who end up with videos worth watching, he adds, are usually the ones who started filming before they felt ready—not after they had a reason.
