Adventures in Video, Outwitting SAD, Twitch Fail

I spent my time off over the holidays immersing myself in filming videos for the YouTube diamond painting channel that I’ve been wanting to launch for over a year now. I say “immersing” because as it turns out, obsessive absorption is a requirement of the job when it comes to getting even one single coherent video up. Maybe it won’t be like that forever, and at some point in the future I’ll be an old pro, whipping out slickly produced, beautifully lit, and finely articulated videos in well under an hour, but that is decidedly not the case now. The process has been a clunky, tedious slow-moving series of stops and starts, frustrating errors like filming an entire video in one shot and then realizing I had something distracting in the frame, and re-shooting simply because I thought I sounded insipid or I hated what my voice was doing. There was all of that, on top of learning the decent but somewhat limited open-source video editing software I’ve been working with.

Even though it’s been a hair-pulling experience in some ways, it has been quite fun and creative. I’ve really enjoyed the process of thinking through how I am going to structure the videos and talk about the subject matter. I love writing the scripts and playing around with the editing software to enhance the final product. I’m starting to get into the flow of all of that now after five videos. The one thing that’s going to take a while is truly finding my “video voice”—my stamp of personality, my own unique take, my (ugh, this sounds so narcissistic) “me” to come to full fruition. I’ve started out more or less imitating my favorite content producers while trying to maintain a calm, positive, upbeat demeanor and not sound like a total bliss ninny. The other issue is that I can’t endlessly buy new diamond paintings just for review content—quality kits are not cheap and I have no room for a stash—so I have to come up with topics to engage the audience that do not involve weekly product reviews, which are very popular. As are “WIP and Chats”—hour-plus long videos in which producers dot their works-in-progress while they entertainingly chat away about their lives. My acting days are many years away now, just getting used to talking on camera again has been a process, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to listen to me gab idly for up to 60 minutes--but that’s not going to stop me. Pulling off my first WIP-and-Chat will be an achievement akin to running one’s first marathon or scaling Mount Rainier.

As I age, every Seattle winter weighs more and more heavily on me. The dark feels thick, like a substance, the cold feels hauntingly oppressive, and dragging myself out of the house after 5:00 p.m. for any reason seems like a physical and emotional impossibility. We’re edging out of the worst of the infamous Long Dark now, with an achingly meager bit of increased light in the evenings, but we’re not out of the woods yet. To cheer myself up, I’ve been thinking ahead about my deck flower boxes and what I’m going to plant come May. Last year was a total rush job with the move, and I planted in July, which was very late. Nonetheless, I was very pleased that my flowers lasted well into mid-October and thrived despite my inexperience. The only thing that didn’t work out was the herbs. I planted them in a multi-tiered pot that sat on the deck and I don’t think they got enough sunlight, plus I think they were too crowded and cramped. I am plotting a new herb scheme for the Spring, planning to choose only a few that I will actually use, and trying to figure out a better way to dry and preserve them. Dreaming about such things is helping to take the edge off the Season Affective Disorder that I seem to have developed over the last few years.

I griped in my last post about the twitch-based temple runs in my otherwise calm and beautiful farming sim. I finally put my big-girl pants on and tried, really tried, to get through them. Instead of blundering around in a panic, I made myself watch the patterns patiently and trained my muscle memory to get through the puzzles. It was good for my brain to slow down, focus, observe, and coordinate the physical with the mental. I’m proud to report that had middling success getting through good portions of them, but I needed Mr. Typist to save the day on the trickiest and twitchiest of them. One is only born with so much fast-twitch muscle fiber and powers of observation and he is endowed with far more than I in those areas. But it was good training for me for to at least try, and who knows, maybe it works like crossword puzzles are purported to and helps to stave off Alzheimer’s. See, it’s not time-wasting video gaming—it’s preventative medicine!

--Kristen McHenry