When Everything Goes Wrong While Making a Video…

This week’s new video started out a lot longer and different than what ultimately ended up being uploaded:

After seven months without posting videos, I thought it might be fun to create a “What I’ve Been Up to in 2021 So Far” type of video. Even though I wasn’t making videos for the first half of this year, I was still doing creative things and being (somewhat) productive despite the ever looming anxiety of the state of the world (lol).

Somehow I thought I could talk about:

• My adventures in rebranding
• Journaling
• Yoga
• Taking charge of my health
• Cooking
• Playing Animal Crossing
• Finn
• Traveling and see friends for the first time since the pandemic
• And more!

All in a reasonably timed video!

But even when I thought I could turn 47 minutes into something…watchable, editing the video proved to be near impossible.

I got a DJI OM 4 gimbal for Christmas, and my thought had been I’d film more “casual/on-the-go” type vlogs with it. It’s certainly proven useful for travel and theme park videos, but I always struggle with downloading and processing the footage. Premiere just DOES NOT LIKE whatever way it’s been encoded and I typically have to run it through iMovie or something Apple related in order to get a file that Adobe can use without crashing. (This was the struggle I had with the heart monitor video I filmed in August).

After I’d gone through the process of getting all the footage usable, I realized that the lighting/grain/audio was not ideal or consistent throughout. I fought the auto-exposure which would randomly blow out my face without warning for the first few clips. Then switched to manually setting the ISO and exposure which looked good at the time of filming, but when editing I realized it was nothing but a grainy mess! (Still trying to figure out how I didn’t see that on my screen at the time.) Finally I went outside for the latter half of the video which I thought would solve all the lighting problems (it did), but added audio problems because there was a breeze (a microphone for my iPhone set-up is still on my “to-buy” list) and the cicadas are out in FULL FORCE in Virginia. (I guess I’ve just become desensitized to them because it didn’t even occur to me until halfway through filming that it might be hard to hear me over the relentless BUZZ.)

So when trying to scrape something out of that mess of footage for a video, I realized it may just need to be re-filmed. I plucked out the initial portion of the video (where I discuss my attempts at rebranding), filtered it down to a script (that had an actual conclusion) and filmed it again. (Sometimes that’s the best option if not the most ideal one). And that’s what you’ll see in this week’s YouTube video!

Ultimately, I realized that most of those topics I was trying to cram into one “recap” video could be their own video. So why not pace it out and fully enjoy talking about all my creative pursuits? No need to rush it!

(Also I’m filling out my mobile camera set up now so that I don’t run into these technical issues in the future…hopefully).

Sometimes things go awry, but it can also mean you end up making a better video in the end!