Video: The Perfect 8-Bit Computer Monitor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGdfGhlIquk

Oh man. This was an absurd video to make, for no good reason.

First, the things that worked: You may notice the wardrobe change. Up until now, I've been completely married to collared shirts, for a couple reasons, one of which being that I need something to clip my lav mic to (I've tried the various T-shirt techniques with no success.)

For this one, I was just viciously opposed to putting on the collared shirt for Reasons, and since I got a decent boom mic a couple weeks ago and was okay with a possibly diminished audio quality (since I was going for an ad-hoc style, more on that later) I decided to just wear a T-shirt and use the boom - and it worked! Way better than I expected, and better than any of my test attempts have gone, for unknown reasons.

This is great for me, both because I never intended to have a fixed wardrobe (it's just really hard to find a good collared shirt that looks good on camera) and because I don't need to be tethered to the mic.

I also made a change that several people suggested: When I add new info during the editing process as on-screen titles, I insert a little pop each time so people who are listening rather than watching can tab back to see what it says. Everyone so far seems to like this.

So that all went well, and I like this video in the end, but man, I wasted so much time and effort on this one - and another one that was supposed to come out first!

See, I went to the studio last week on Thursday to dick around with my IBM PC - by the way, I got a pristine-condition 5150 - and while there, I thought "what if I whipped up a quick video about this machine, and used that as an excuse to show people my PVM-1390 that's been sitting on a shelf for four months?"

In my head it was like one of those "weird stuff" videos I used to do. In practice, it was just a nightmare. I was there for like four hours, struggling to figure out what to say into the camera, and only realized very belatedly that I was not capable of doing a "weird stuff" type video about these things, since I knew too much about them.

That video format works well for "here's a bunch of stuff I haven't figured out yet" but since I knew all about these things already, I was just trying to do a full explanation off the top of my head, and making a total hash of it. At one point I suddenly realized that I had been planning on showing the two devices working together, but had totally forgotten that I didn't have the right cable for that, and had no way to make it. So I gave up and went home.

The next day, me and Daria went back to the studio to make a better go of it, but with the two topics separated.

This ended up being an agonizing, miserable experience. It took probably four hours just to get through the stuff about the PC, and we had no time to shoot the second video (as I'd hoped) about the PVM.

Then, when I got home, I discovered the audio was ruined. We hadn't gaffed a mic cord, and it was thumping against the stand through the entire video. It sounded so bad, I couldn't even edit the video, I just deleted the footage.

The next day we returned to the office - this is the third day, mind you. A "quick ad-hoc thing" that turned into two things and was now on its third reshoot.

We spent five hours struggling through the IBM PC video. It was agonizing. With no script, I was talking in circles, umming and ahhing - I have no idea how I used to do this for every video, what was WRONG with me??

After I finally, finally made it all the way through, we started doing the PVM video, and after about half an hour I just stood up, told Daria to give me the SSDs, erased them, and started writing a script.

It took me maybe two hours to write the script and another two hours to shoot it. So to tally this up:

- Four hours of my time on shoot 1

- Four hours for both of us on shoot 2

- Twelve hours for both of us on shoot 3

That's 36 man-hours of labor to produce, ultimately... one video. Because the PC one was so bad, I threw it out again. Yes, I have thrown this video away three times.

Scriptwriting is so critical to what I'm doing, because even with the scripts, written days ahead of time, with The Entire Internet at my fingertips to do research, I get things wrong.

Without the script, I get everything wrong, and I had to can the PC video after I realized that I'd made multiple egregious factual errors. There was just no fixing it.

I have no idea what I was thinking, but I'm glad I at least got one video I like out of this whole miserable mess. Can never get that Labor Day back, though.