Greg Wasz, a Cincinnati-based sales professional and founder of Greg Wasz Productions, is urging families to use the holiday season as a prompt to record video of everyday moments, not just big vacations. Wasz, who has spent years turning his family's travel and holiday footage into finished videos, says the stretch from late November through the start of a new year gives families more reasons to pick up a camera than almost any other time.
"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." He noted that the instinct to film tends to appear on major trips, such as a week in Italy or a stay at Disney, while quieter moments at home over the holidays are skipped more often, even though they hold up just as well on screen.
Wasz identified the most common mistake he sees as treating video as something reserved for vacations. A living room on Christmas morning, a grandparent telling a story at the table, or children 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," he said. "Those in-between moments are usually the ones that matter most a few years later."
He also pointed out that holiday gatherings often include family members who do not appear in footage the rest of the year. Grandparents, cousins, and relatives who live far away may 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 approaches his own holiday and travel footage the way he treats any project for Greg Wasz Productions: he shoots more than he thinks he needs, then edits down later. He said the editing step 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 said the same approach works at any scale, whether the footage comes from a week abroad or a single evening around a table.
Wasz suggested that the turn of the calendar is a natural point for families to change how they think about recording their own lives. His recommendation is not a new piece of equipment or a different app, but a change in what gets filmed in the first place. "Start with what's already happening instead of waiting for a big event," he said. "A holiday dinner or a quiet afternoon at home is enough." He added that families do not need to film everything to end up with something worth keeping. A few minutes of real moments, captured without much planning, often outlasts footage from an event that was staged for the camera.
As the year closes, Wasz said the families who end up with videos worth watching are usually the ones who started filming before they felt ready, not after they had a reason. The implication for families is that the barrier to creating a lasting record is lower than many assume: a phone, a few minutes, and a willingness to capture the ordinary are enough. For the broader culture of home video, Wasz's advice shifts emphasis from production value and special occasions to presence and timing, suggesting that the most valuable footage may be the kind that is easiest to overlook.
