yesterday i used every spare hour in my day to put together a video for my new youtube channel, and all in all i am mostly happy with the results. i’ll link it to this post.
i wanted to keep it super short, like short enough to post on my insta feed - 60 seconds or less - but i would’ve had to cut out a lot of little details that i thought were fun. so i decided to just slap the whole thing together start to finish and see how long the video ended up being, for science. the good news is that even including everything i wanted to include, it came in under six minutes. i feel like five to ten minutes is a good video length - as long as there is plenty i’d shot variety and interesting dialogue/ story happening.
mom also glad that i shot very little footage that i didn’t use, so i wasn’t wasting time during the photo shoot taking worthless video. that fits into my goal of creating interesting video content to share the experience of being a photographer in nyc without wasting my clients’ time.
from start to finish, i probably spent about four hours editing this video, and a lot of that time was spent fiddling with premiere pro since the program is still new to me and it’s been a while since i did any video work. hopefully the lessons learned yesterday will translate into faster edits going forward. i still have a lot to learn and hone down, though. like for instance, i forgot to include my social media links in the video, and i didn’t show swana’s insta handle when i introduced her. i also want to find some good sound effects to play when i show a photo, when text is displayed on screen, and during transitions. but all of that will come with time.
there were a couple of quirks that i need to work out moving forward. first off, my video doesn’t display correctly on my tv screen. it’s like the tv is slightly zoomed in and the edges of the video are not fitting into the monitor. i’ll have to figure out how to fix that. and then there was this weird animation that happened with some of my text that i didn’t mean to include and don’t like. i’ll have to figure out how to fix that and control it. but even though those two weird quirks made it into the published video, i ain’t mad.
the important thing for me yesterday was to publish a video. it had been a week since my first video and i don’t want to lose momentum. we head to europe for nine days on wednesday evening, and i want to put out one video a week. now is the time to establish best practices, to experiment and adapt, to make mistakes and learn from them. because almost no one is watching, and the only people who are watching will give me honest feedback about my content that will help me grow into a content producer worthy of attention. at least that is my hope.