 I can't say for sure just yet, but I think I might be calling it quits early tonight. For a little too long now I've been kicking it until about 3:30-4am but tonight I feel like it might be almost time to call it a night. It's just about 1am. I feel like I cheated you, my lovely readers, by just posting a how-to yesterday and not a real blog. Not that the blog would have been any better--the highlight of my day yesterday was getting screwed over on a cell phone deal on craigslist. Now, having sat on the details for 24 hours, I certainly am glad I didn't really waste any time writing about it. How retarded would that have been? Today, I was supposed to record my krumbinesBRAIN footage. Although I only had one script written. And if you've been paying any attention to my waning energy these past two weeks, you can probably guess what actually ended up happening today. Nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. Read about all the something after the break. I didn't do anything with krumbinesBRAIN, to be sure. What I did do was organizational work and a lot of note-taking. I laid out the next 14 episodes of WEBCAMS and outlined what needed to be written or re-written. I jotted down notes for 6 new episodes of krumbinesBRAIN. I finished prepping footage for the Golf episode of WEBCAMS (which I'm thinking about moving from Friday's to Monday's). And for my major accomplishment for the day, I did a draft re-write for one of Ben's WEBCAMS scripts.
What I came to realize in the shower today (I have all my greatest epiphanies in the shower .... don't you?) was that as much as I might organize what I do during the week and during a given day, I need to start paying some mind to what I do during the month. A good example of why I need to do this is how Little Zombies has been unfairly pushed to a back burner. The 9th episode audio is produced and edited, and I should finished the damn thing weeks ago, but I've been too caught up with krumbinesBRAIN to really take care of it. From there, I worked myself into a ridiculous frenzy over maintaining a thrice-weekly schedule for KB so that I could meet my self-imposed deadline of hitting my 100th episode by year's end. And then, after WEBCAMS slowed to every two weeks (while at the same time getting more interest and requests than ever before) it's now faltered to whenever I can get it done. Eventually, I need to just accept the fact that I'm prone to burning myself out. Accept it, compensate, and move on. I keep revising my schedule and expectations and keep getting more efficient, but what I realized in the shower today is that I need to take things one step further. Instead of waiting to hit the wall that I know will be coming, just incorporate some appropriate downtime into my monthly schedule. 3 weeks on, one week off. If managed properly, that one week off can be spent doing a butt-load of writing and prep work, taking advantage of the down-time to come up with and work on those elusive ideas for WEBCAMS and everything else. That's what this week is going to be for me, and I'm pretty happy with how it's started out. And I can already tell that by next Monday, I'll be more than ready (and happy) to hit the ground running with krumbinesBRAIN in addition to getting back to a weekly WEBCAMS schedule. And won't that just be better for everybody? I think so. The other thing that's been percolating on my mind today was a bit of criticism I received about my videos, and how they should be shorter. I'm not naming names or pointing fingers because I don't really care. What it got me thinking about, however, was the age-old argument of quantity versus quality. The point was made that no matter how you sliced it, I would gross a higher amount of views if Tube Talking was chopped up into smaller episodes. More views means more ad exposure means more potential money in my pocket. While I certainly want to make money with my videos, I don't think I want to sacrifice my vision for my creative material. And if I lose viewers because of it, well, fuck 'em. I don't want them anyway. What I do want is to be known as the place to go for quality content. No, I don't have any interest in producing :60 super-viral videos. I want to produce story and character driven scripted productions and "live" shows that delve into the creative process. And based on the MAJORITY of feedback I get, I seriously believe there's an audience for that. I don't like the idea of pandering to an audience. I hate when people jump on YouTube and ask their viewers what they want to see. I believe that if you are a content creator, your primary responsibility is to yourself and if you have to ask what other people expect of you, than you might as well just shoot yourself in the foot. More to the point, I don't believe that I need to adhere to the 3-minute rule in order to maintain and grow my audience -- you people are intelligent, enlightened, and creative. If you want to see 60 seconds shots of people getting hit in the nuts, you know where to find it. If you want to see something with a little depth and meaning to it, you know where to find that, too. If you're incapable of telling the difference between the two, than fuck it, no one needs you anyway. Here's to pissing people off, forging your own path, and raising the bar. Cause hasn't already been lowered enough? |
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