Video: A Short Story About Shorts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJ_6LCly4A

Gonna release this right now, no time for early access. Things have not gone to plan at all lately - this video was supposed to be out last week.

It speaks for itself for the most part, but _man_, it's just yet more proof that I cannot make a "simple" video.

I got myself all upset about this big lump of crap sitting in my office for six months while i hemmed and hawed over it, so I banged out a script in half an hour and went to shoot it the next day. Got it done in two hours flat, an incredibly fast shoot.

...then I discovered that I hated it. I never got around to posting that version on Patreon because I dropped it on Discord first and got such a negative response that I realized I had just totally bunged it and deleted the video.

Then I rewrote it, and basically flipped the entire plot front to back. The whole star trek angle was a brilliant suggestion from a patron on Discord, I had brought up the connection in the original script but I hadn't figured out that it should be the lede, so the initial video was just kind of scattered and dull.

With this new approach, I had a much better basis for a narrative... and was now just as far into it as *any* other video I've made. The whole plan of "let's make a simple, quick video" was in the trash.

The reshoot went just as quick, but then I got home, plugged the drives in, hit play... and discovered a DEAFENING ground hum. I must have laid the mic cable across a power cord.

It was heartbreaking. I had intended to put five hours *tops* into this production. Here I was, at easily the ten hour mark, and looking at a THIRD reshoot on a video that I had come to hate and regret.

I tried applying RX7 De-hum, and it did literally nothing. I have no idea what that plugin is for, it's supposed to fix exactly this but it didn't do a thing. So then I tried RX7 Denoise, and miraculously, it worked. If you listen on headphones you may be able to hear it, but only just. I can't believe I actually salvaged this, the hum was HORRIBLE.

It was really hard to edit the video, mentally. I felt like it was such a weak script to begin with, full of speculation and very little action, and I didn't love the camera angle I'd picked - or the second one.

This is my first video shot on my new camera, and I wanted to experiment with new techniques. Since I have the old camera still (which has virtually identical capabilities) I wanted to shoot two angles. On the first shoot, I tried a completely off angle position, literally 90 degrees to the side. It made sense in my head, but the result was not great.

With this one I tried a much shallower angle, just a foot or two to the left of the main camera, and it works much better - but I really thought I'd framed it much better than I had. I don't love the result and I'm lucky I got any footage out of it at all.

So I have a lot of work to do to figure out how to work two cameras with no formal training and only one camera operator, and honestly I hated this video up until about the last hour I was working on it, when I really came around and decided I liked it.

Now let's just find out if all the ex-military folks in my comments are gonna tell me how wrong I got it and that the whole video is a waste of time!