Today I made my first serious attempt and produced this 90-second effort, showing the monuments and sculptures of the Seaboard Villages where I live.

(Please be patient if the video keeps pausing. Flickr seems to be having some teething troubles with video streaming.) 

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What you're seeing in the video:

1. Hilton Stone
2. Mermaid of the North
3. The Salmon
4. Shandwick Stone

The music is My Irish Valentine by Brobdingnagian Bards, a Texas-based Celtic folk band. Listen to more of their music here. This track is licensed for use under the Creative Commons. (Hopefully using the music as a soundtrack doesn't violate the No Derivative Works condition?)

You may wonder why I used a song with "Irish" in the title for a video featuring Scottish villages. Well the answer is that I just like it. The Bards actually do a track called The Mermaid Song which would obviously have been fitting for this video, but that track can't be used under the Creative Commons license, and anyway I wanted an instrumental track and My Irish Valentine has exactly the sort of atmosphere that I was looking for.

Things to improve next time:

• Get better at zoom-with-pan shots, and only use them when there's something moving in the scene such as water or sky, otherwise it looks like zooming on a still photo.
• Use less fixed view scenes, but without just panning or zooming for the sake of it. Parts of this video look like a slideshow of stills.
• Learn how to process video files to improve exposure and colour.
• Combine original audio with the music. The part of this video with the mermaid had good audio so it would have been nice to still hear that.