Getting out of your own way when making video

Overview

Essay version of the video is below. You can also listen to the audio-only podcast version and subscribe to the unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed.

Let it be messy!

How do you get out of your own way when you’re trying to make media?

It isn’t easy. If you aren’t used to it – if, for example, text is your primary medium – this shit is quite hard.

I don’t know how many takes I’ve tried, or how often I’ve recorded videos only to find them unusable. This isn’t even my first attempt at this particular YouTube channel and starting something here.

Video is not easy. There’s a reason why it often requires an entire crew for it to look good.

There are people who find video to be an easy fit to how they think. They process the world using vlogs and “tic tocs”, much as I process my experience of the world using text.

Text is how I think. I write even when I don’t have to – even when it’s not a part of an overall business or freelancing strategy.

Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out.

The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think?

The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall.

‘Just let it be messy!’

This actually goes back to when I was teaching twenty years ago.

If you don’t know my background, I have worked at the crossroads between technology, publishing, and media for twenty-five years. So I have this background where I’m aware of the – not just the technical side or the practice, but also the theoretical context.

It doesn’t help!

It doesn’t make this easier. Doesn’t make sitting in front of a camera and, well, avoiding an anxiety attack any easier.

For some reason I don’t mind recording audio as much. I can handle recording and even the sound of my own voice, but as soon as I’m on camera it gets a bit more stressful.

The core problem I’m facing is that as a consumer, as a reader, or watcher of video, I have taste. I have skills as a consumer. It’s one of the reasons why, if you didn’t start writing regularly when you were young, and try to start writing later on when you’re an adult, one of the things that gets in your way, is that you actually have a well-honed assessment of what kind of writing you like.

That gets in your own way because you can tell as soon as you start writing that you aren’t delivering the same quality or the same structure. Your writing isn’t convincing like the writing you prefer as a reader. So this mismatch between your skills as a reader and skills as a writer can cause a sort of mental roadblock. This applies to most creative fields – design, photography, and so on.

If you have got an eye, but you don’t have the hand-to-eye coordination or the skills to create a composition, you’re going to have a hard time starting.

I actually worked for a very brief period of time in TV. And I went through the earliest version of what later became Iceland’s film school. I helped many work on video and I can tell that what I’m making now isn’t as good as I’d like, which might confuse some because they look at it and go:

That’s fine. It’s at least as good as the other nonsense I watch.

This is why I should just get out of my way and let things be messy.

I’m going to try and not obsess about that slight noise disturbance that I keep hearing in the audio setup that makes me paranoid and worried that something in all of this is causing something that I don’t like.

You might not even hear it.

(It was a random RF disturbance in the headphone port of the interface, so not in the recording. And, yes, I did get paranoid and worried about it.)

I’m not going to obsess over the fact that the lighting is basically a jury-rigged set of seven Ikea bulbs, two reflectors, and an improvised diffusion cloth out of some sort of packing material.

I’m just going to let this be imperfect. Because that’s literally the advice, back in a former life when I was teaching, that I used to give students.

It’s better to have imperfect work than no work at all.

Because if you let your standards – your taste – stop you from doing messy, imperfect things, you won’t ever get the practice you need to make the less messy, less imperfect things.

So you need to make stuff. You need to accept the flaws and the weirdness and stop obsessing over details.

Be more forgiving of yourself.

Because – you know – you’re the only one who you can guarantee will be forgiving of yourself. You can’t control other people’s responses, but you can try to control your own.

So, this is an attempt at a first new video in a while.

Letting it be imperfect. Letting it go through.

It’s raining outside. Quite calming. Probably what I need.

There are going to be more of these.

I have got a long list of topics I want to cover, and I am hoping to improve this process over time.

But, in the meantime, please don’t be mean.

Or, if you want to be mean, don’t be mean somewhere I can see.

Leave it until the third video or something.

If you want to be kind.