Trip to Oahu to support my brother's high school football team, connect with our Hawaiian roots, and spend time together as a family.
This video was made to preserve the memories made on my family's trip to Oahu in August 2026. The purpose of the trip was to support my brother's high school football team (Mira Mesa Marauders), who played their first game of the season against James B. Castle High School in Kaneohe, Hawaii, which something the team had been planning for years. For me this trip was about supporting my brother, connecting with my Hawaiian roots, and spending time with my family.
We listened to my traditional Hawaiian playlist the whole trip, which includes music similar to what my grandparents used to play when I was little, and I've adopted it as my own over the years. By the time I sat down to edit when we got home, I already had a couple songs in mind for the video.
Five days' worth of footage from a trip that had significant meaning came with the difficult task of deciding which clips would earn a place in the final edit, and what just gets left on my hard drive.
I shot footage all five days, from the Polynesian Cultural Center to Waikiki to the Nuʻuanu Pali to the game itself, so I knew one song wasn't going to be enough to cover the whole video. I ended up going with "Polehoonalani" by Kuana Torres Kahele and "Pua Be Still" by Dennis Pavao, which are two songs with a medium pace and perfect even beats to cut footage to. I marked the beats, found a perfect spot to blend the two songs, and built the video out from there, by dragging and dropping the clips into my timeline, trimming, retiming, adding stabilization and speed ramps, and color grading.
My objective for this project was to take everything I shot and preserve it into one video my family and I can look back on and remember the precious memories we made on this trip.