If I haven’t made it clear enough, I purposefully don’t have a lot of expectations for this 100 Days of Vlogging project.
It’s akin to just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
If anything sticks really well, it may be something I do a lot more with.
At the absolute least, it’ll get things moving somewhere. That’s what’s really important to me.
So, I’m not expecting (or, really, even wanting) to get “YouTube Famous” or rake in that shared ad revenue. I just want to get a bunch of content out there, get comfortable talking to an empty room with one soulless eye looking at me, and, in general, prove to myself that I can actually pull off something of this scale.
What is the scale of this?
If you’re like most people, you’ve never really pulled together a video project of any size or complexity. I kind of wish I were that naive when it comes to the process.
Once upon a time, I wanted to make movies. And TV shows. Back then, there wasn’t anything even close to the Internet we know today, let alone YouTube. The home video technology was in its infancy. Things were really expensive. And there weren’t any cheap and easy ways to learn how to do this stuff. (Especially if you weren’t old enough to get a job.)
In college, I took a bunch of film and video classes. Technology had improved a bit by then, but good quality stuff was still on the really expensive side of the budget line and, while the Internet was almost a household idea, there still wasn’t anything like YouTube.
I worked for a few years down here in the DC area at a place that produces a lot of videos. I have a lot of friends who make movies–shorts and features and webseries. I still keep up on the industry as a whole and things have come a very long way in the last 30 years. Good quality stuff… is in your smart phone. That ubiquitous $600 or so hunk of technology produces video quality beyond anything a non-pro was using back fifteen years ago, let alone in the 80s and 90s.
Shooting and editing are the biggest time sinks with what I have planned. I’m decidedly trying not to script things right off the top. I’m also trying to avoid a lot of pre-production work, for the most part. And any fancy post-production work, too.
This is a hobby project that I’m squeezing in between everything else that I do when I get home from work.
Thankfully, that doesn’t exactly mean that the quality is going to be horrible. It’s tricky to create truly horrible quality these days. Sure, stuff can be bad–bad content, bad lighting, bad sound–but if you have half a clue (which is at least what I have), it’s easy to avoid the worst of those “bad” things.
So, that’s something.
Overall, a 3-5 minute video of me just yammering on will likely take about half an hour to fully put together. Maybe less if I can overcome my innate desire to fiddle with things. Optimally, it would take ten minutes. Everything done in one shot, a quick run through Premiere Pro to trim things, and then uploaded.
We’ll see how that goes in practice.
But what about concrete goals?
Fine, you want some actual concrete goal? Something to aim for? Some distinct measure that can mark a milestone.
How about this: 100 Eyes.
That’s 50 people. (Generally speaking…)
I’ll be completely satisfied if I can get at least 50 people regularly watching what I put out there. And by “regularly watching” I mean that there are 50 people subscribed to my YouTube channel with view count at least coming close to that on a video to video basis.
If I get more… well, that just means I’m actually doing something right… and that something has stuck to that wall and will need to be looked at a little more closely.
Speaking of eyes… click the big green button below here to get your eyes to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).
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