If you read my WordPress blog you'd know that a.) I tested positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago and b.) I've been watching a lot of Lindsay Ellis videos lately, kinda. I still have all of "loose canon" to get through, those videos are relatively short but there's a lot of 'em, and AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER IT'S REALLY BOTHERING ME HOW THE SINGLE AND DOUBLE QUOTES ARE ACTUALLY JUST FOOT AND INCH MARKS you don't see these kind of shenanigans on WordPress, I grew complacent or something.
‘“”’ see isn’t that refreshing. I mean it’s not "incorrect" to use "straight marks" necessarily, or even at all, they’re just forms of quotation marks, it’s not like programs that convert ASCII-style marks like that to their curly brethren are 100% accurate in their automatic doing so, but (is that why it)’s bothering me so much because the " marks look like a positive COVID result
So I figured I’d get a post in today, while it’s still the day that I’ve tested negative (for the first time in my life actually, I think. I hadn’t actually taken a COVID test (I don’t think) until that first one on Jan 1, which read | |, which = +.) Here’s the thing- I was kind of getting used to having COVID. I was getting used to never leaving the house and barely even leaving my room. I was especially getting used to not having to go to work.
One year ago, from the very beginning of April to the last week in June, I took what was initially supposed to be one month off, which spiraled into almost three-- working on my project, my 9-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube project. (urgh and it’s doing a double en dash instead of a single em dash)
Initially the plan was to work on that project last Tuesday, from even before I would turn out spending the day in quarantine: it’s a vlog of 2 January, and so last year for a chunk there the idea was that it would come out 2 January, albeit a few years on. The idea before that had been 4 May, and that’s the idea again, but the current draft is labeled the 2 January draft- so, you figure, January 2nd would be an excellent time to finish a draft labeled January 2nd. But.
all- of- my- notes
whichI’dbeengoingtocompile
in the, it’s fine it’s fine, draft,
all my notes that I’d taken over no less than three separate occasions last year watching through the entire almost-10-hour-video and taking notes, those notes are in my personal planner: which, thing number c.) because I also talked about it in my WordPress blog, it’s all in my personal planner for last year, and said planner is ???, might as well be at the bottom of the sea, lost it somewhere a few weeks ago and I’m at a total loss as to where.
So I couldn’t actually work on the draft on the day I’d been planning on it. And for an entire week, a little over, I couldn’t even put in any editing work in the places I knew were already working but could just use some footage going on in the background, because it was like, nooo, it needs to be done in the correct order. In my brain.
So last week I spent watching... (...grabbing my personal planner for this year and looking through it) westerns, and Real Steel, and the Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 director’s commentary, and a double feature of Titanic and Birdman of all things, and rewatching Jurassic Park and Glass Onion. And a bunch of Lindsay Ellis videos. And reading a bunch too. But no working on my project! Except for to, mask up occasionally and upend a bunch of furniture in search of my dang At-A-Glance!
But halfway into this week I could finally start working on my project again, At-A-Glance or no. Did that for a full day, only pausing to film for a different project while the lighting was good, and to catch the latest Folding Ideas video which had come out within the past 24 hours. Mostly working on my project though. Editing, but also making the adjustments to the script that I remembered at least needed to be made. That was Thursday. And yesterday...
Yesterday I took a break for, not the entire day but it felt like it was going to be.
Tim Rogers’ Action Button Reviews is a YouTube series I take great inspiration from whether I want to or not, where he talks ostensibly about video games but really about everything; the shortest episode is over three hours long, and he bleeds for that time, through each and every video. He’s on season two right now, but the finale of season one is a multi-part choose-your-own-adventure playlist where he talks about Cyberpunk 2077: a game pretty good for something made entirely of problems. There are eight parts to the review: an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion; the idea is that you open, choose two of the internal six chapters to watch, before reaching the conclusion. (If you watch all eight chapters the whole thing is even longer than my own 9-hour-twentysomething-minute video, but that’s proscribed. And so instead you watch through it three times, which takes a little over four hours longer.) I’d already watched through it twice before, and so yesterday I began (and today I finished) the path where I could sweep up the final two chapters I had not yet gotten to. I’d forgotten how much Tim Rogers bleeds for that time.
I also watched a Lindsay Ellis livestream she did with a bunch of her YouTube cocreators (her cocreators! thing number d.)), on Nebula (though it is on YouTube, just unlisted (you can get to it through a playlist though.)) It’s about persona, the identity these creators, semi-public figures, craft to present themselves as on the internet. It was also pretty raw, and contextualized a lot of stuff I hadn't even realized lacked context beforehand.
So there was, time, for introspection on a lot of stuff, why exactly (for the millionth time it feels like sometimes) I feel like this video needs to exist in the world, why I need to make video at all. Last night I dreamt I was starting up a new channel, and had a good workflow and a solid first video guaranteed to be a hit and generate a lot of views (maybe even some ad revenue.) And I’d just started, but I felt like I could reliably put out one video every two weeks- and my agent (?) was thus all, great, you’re going to need to do two videos every one week. And I had my passion project video which it would take two weeks to do, but I had one day before I needed to put out a new video, and no matter what I decided to do it was a compromise, and I was waking up on a morning where I would need to do an entire video from conception to publication in one day.
But I actually did do work on the video yesterday.
Five sections, not counting interludes, each section taking place in four segments, that's twenty segments in total. Of those twenty, I have one that’s basically finished (just need to shoot a five-second bit of footage) and one that’s let’s say half-finished (there’s a text I quote extensively from and I need to make it visually interesting somehow, but the rest of the segment is 100% done.) I’ll plug in an hour’s worth of work and I’ll wind up with twenty seconds of footage in the background, of a nine-hour video: but those are some handsome twenty seconds.
All this is to say, in between the introspection and the editing and the fact that I’m used to not having to go into work, and the fact that Tim Rogers did seventeen consecutive 20-hour workdays in a row to edit the masterpiece that is his 5:56:26 Tokimeki Memorial video (bleeds)(I'm not sure of course how comparable it is putting together video game footage and putting together movie footage)* and that I want some bleedtime before the May 4th deadline, and also I’ll have Fiddler rehearsals again for the next two months... I really really want to do that again, just for this month, taking time off of work so that I can work on the video.
But also I’m afraid it’s just going to look like I’m chickening out of working outside because of the weather.
*To compound the question of how relevant this is, but to explain the relevance at all: by the time I reached the end of June being off of work for those three months, my editing pace was sluggish. I felt uninspired, felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, and was working on the project less time per day than I worked while I was still holding down a steady job. There was no reason anymore to miss out on my job, which I genuinely love. Now, however, I’m feeling genuinely inspired to edit again. But sometimes there’s a (visual) metaphor you can achieve using video game footage that you shot, that you just can’t achieve with footage from the movie you’re talking about.