A Month of Vlogging, What I learnt

For the month of July I decided to vlog every day.

This was inspired by Will Fleming, an all round awesome person and a creative kinda guy who has committed himself to a video a day for a whole year.

I had two main reasons to do this challenge.

• To keep me on track with my day to day goals.
• To help me get better with editing video.

How it went:

Well first off I did post a video a day for a month, one was really short saying a proper one was coming the next day, one was how to fix out of sync audio problems, and one was a short update saying I was too tired and couldn’t update ← no one actually saw this one, as I deleted it the next morning. All the other entries were vlogs about my day.

It went quite well, and I liked capturing the things I normally notice, but either only share via a random picture to maybe 1 or 2 people, or it becomes part of a story I am telling later down the track. As for the keeping on track with daily goals, well…………. That went OK, but wasn’t the stellar performance I was hoping for.

What I learnt:

I never thought editing video was easy, but then when most of my videos I’ve made were around the 3 minute mark, how long could that take I thought? Waaay longer than I expected.

Now, sure I could have not edited anything at all really and just put it straight up “as is” but for me, that’s not what I wanted, I wanted something more like the videos I like to watch.

I now have a much bigger respect for people that edit things, that make bigger videos, work on film and all of that.

So I guess it boils down to, to make something good/great/better than the raw footage, it takes time, and time is an important commodity no matter what you are doing. Some nights I was up until 11/12 editing, just so I could get my video up and on the internet even though I had an early start the next morning, this doesn’t fare well when I’m not a night person at all.

So what’s the plan now?

I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks as I have been doing the vlogs, and I’ve been thinking about what would work best for me.

So the initial plan is:

• To keep shooting footage every day when I see something interesting/unique/weird or I have something interesting to say.
• Publish a vlog episode once a week instead of daily
• Publish stand alone videos of events or things that merit their own single video and not be part of a vlog episode.

The reasons for these decisions are pretty simple I think:

• Firstly some days nothing happens, I mean nothing, and there is only so much I can talk about and only so many walks I can go on.
• I’d rather sit down and edit a 5-10 minute video from a bunch of footage, than a 2-3 min video from the footage from just one day.
• Doing it every day is way too time-consuming for me, especially when my other projects will start getting busier due to the time of the year, plus I’ve been neglecting them a little bit as I have been editing instead.

Of course, plans can change so I’ll have to see how all of this works out.

To make the editing process easier I’ll need to sort out the laptop situation so I can edit when I’m away from home, the currently predicted amount of 36 cents from YouTube apparently doesn’t buy you much of a laptop.

And lastly, a big thanks to everyone that has checked out the vlog, checked out this site, commented, liked, or even shared and of the videos. You are all awesome.

Lets see how this goes and where it leads.

And if you are reading this and thinking about doing a vlog, shooting some video or just creating something the best piece of advice I can offer is to JUST DO IT. From websites to podcasts and now a vlog I’ve just started doing things and learning as I go. It is the best way, never wait for the right time, because you’ll be waiting forever.