I DON'T KNOW HOW TO YOUTUBE

Hey-yo, you lot. Hope you're all okay.

I dunno how to do YouTube. I really don't. I don't know what you're meant to do to kind of 'break through', and - what's worse - I no longer think I'm capable of it. I'm obviously wired all wrong. 

See, here's the thing... I've been absolutely loving putting together those Lost Footage episodes. If I could just do experimental creative stuff for the rest of my life - and not have to worry about earning money - I would. I absolutely would. 

I spent almost three whole days this week putting together just 90 seconds of the latest episode of Lost Footage (the Amstrong Wong bit), and completely neglected the paid work I should've been doing...!

In fact, doing these episodes has made me realise just how much of a straightjacket I wear a lot of the time. I do it in my day job, obviously, because I have to in order to earn money, but I've been doing it with the Digi Minis/Deluxes etc. to a degree too. And I was doing it with the website, writing about retro gaming when it was starting to eat away at my soul. 

Don't get me wrong; I enjoy doing the more straightforward, chatty, Digi eps. I love putting them together. I enjoyed the challenge, with the Deluxe eps especially, of forcing myself to make something that's just a bit more palatable and accessible. It's kind of like a puzzle to me - working out how to be a 'normal' YouTuber - and there are times when I relish that.

Like when I did a painting course years ago just to prove to myself I could paint 'properly' if I forced myself to do so. Once I'd painted a couple of fairly decent photorealistic portraits, and proved my point to myself, I stopped going. 

Digitiser The Show was an attempt to 'prove' that I could make what I'd regard as a 'normal' video games magazine series. And I kind of did, even if my inherent nature started to bleed through. Having done it, having proven it to myself, I've lost any real motive to do it again.

And I'm sort of getting there now again, having proved myself, as far as the direction of the Digi channel over the last two or so years goes. Even if we've not grown significantly - stagnated, really, if I'm honest - I know the content itself has been good. Mostly.

I'm not about to stop doing the more kind of accessible episodes... but how I approach them might change a bit once we're out of lockdown. I don't know what that might mean yet, but... it's a similar thing to what happened with www.digitiser2000.com, in that I can't get the subscribers on the YouTube channel to grow, no matter what I do. 

In fact, I'm still losing subscribers every time I put up a new video - so I might as well make sure I'm staying true to myself in the first instance. Stop making what I think other people want from me, basically, and stop contorting myself to make stuff that doesn't come naturally.

And, actually, that might be something I need to apply to my day job as well as what I do for a hobby-with-benefits, but we'll see. I mean, it has paid off in terms of building a career... but being more 'me' in my job is much more of a risk...

SCARY

My sort of inherently weird creative sensibilities scare me a bit, because I know they're there, but I don't necessarily see them as weird, and they're not always helpful. I've had to stop denying I see the world in an unusual way, and admit that my natural tendency is to go places that others consider out-there. 

This mostly comes from other people's response to it, though. I've had to have it pointed out. It's like when I've spoken to autistic friends about how some of them have to learn to fake it in social settings, and when it comes to empathy. Well, I have to do it, creatively-speaking, in order to fit in. Plus fitting-in = earning a living (similarly, that's why I reigned in the nonsense on Digitiser The Show, in order to raise as much as possible).

When I'm writing scripts in my day job, I'm faking it, so that I can earn money, and get work. It's a learned skill, it's contorting myself into an unnatural shape. Doing weird, messed-up, non-sequitur, stream-of-consciousness, guff... that's what's bubbling away always beneath that. That's what I'd be doing always if I could. Embracing that would be going with the flow, rather than fighting against it. 

I admit... it sort of hurts a little bit that the Lost Footage episodes are quite some leagues less popular on the channel than any of the recent Digi Deluxe eps. I understand it, because reactions to them from people are that they find them bizarre... but because I don't entirely see this alleged weirdness in them, I kind of recoil when I see that they're not enjoyed by others as much as they are by me. Like, there's part of my brain which doesn't quite understand why people find them so odd. 

Don't get me wrong; I do like that! I love that they get a strong reaction, no matter what it is. It amuses me when people are baffled by them, or freaked out. For me, that in itself is part of why I find them funny, in a meta sort of way. I'm making them challenging on purpose, but conversely I don't get it when people aren't prepared to put in the work!

I guess I just wish, given how much I love them, that they'd reach the full potential in terms of audience. Found Footage never quite took off in the way that I hoped. It's the one thing I've done that I really felt should have really broken through, but it never happened. 

Nonetheless, as I say... I'm feeling kind of done with the trying to fit in, creatively-speaking. I don't think I'm very good at it anyway. No matter how hard I've tried in life, I've always stuck out, despite my best efforts, so now, with all the time to reflect that the global situation has afforded me, I'm thinking it's time to get rid of the straightjacket, and just lean into it. 

#LUCKYBOI

I'm lucky - incredibly so - in that I have a partner who pretty much embraces my weird sense of creativity (I hesitate to call it a sense of humour, because being funny isn't always the intent behind Found Footage and the like), and all of you who support me. Honestly, I have far more of you backing me on Patreon than the size of my audience would suggest. There are much bigger YouTubers with far smaller Patreons than I have, so I must be doing something right. I never, ever take it for granted.

Though given how hard I work on the content on the channel, I am sometimes baffled that some people seem to build enormous audiences, with the barest minimum of effort or originality...! I mean, why don't all those make-up YouTubers have weird cutaways and glitches?!?

So, going forwards, we're going to continue with the Digitiser Value eps with Sanja and I (and hopefully Gannon will pop up remotely at some point). I also thought I might try and interview some of the people I've met over the years through Digi. I was talking with Sanja the other night, and I've got an extremely strange and wonderful collection of friends and acquaintances, who I'd love you to meet. But we'll see about that. 

The Value format is fairly easy to edit, which means it leaves me more time to work on the more involved, edit-heavy, content.

Which, yeah, means I'm going to keep editing Lost Footage eps, and putting them out. I've tried subtly different things with each of the three eps so far, and I want to continue experimenting. Some might just be completely abstract... some might just be a couple of minutes long - as I'm spending slightly more money and time on them than I should be - some might be more ambitious. 

But this is all with a view that when I do turn my attentions fully back to Digitiser Deluxe, or whatever it'll be, once we're out of lockdown, that I'll be ready to make them much more reflective of what I want to be doing. If that makes sense.

I also really, really, really want to do another short film, as part of Lost Footage. Before our accident last year - as in literally minutes before - Sanja and I were talking about filming a follow-up to Trojan Arse Protocol in America, and capture some really epic footage. Given how little money we made Trojan Arse for it should never have looked as good as it did... but now that I know what's achievable, I want to really push it. I've already left it too long.

One way or another I'm going to do that, and once we're out of lockdown, and life (and the economy) has gone back to something approaching normal, I've decided I'm going to try to crowdfund it. 

That might be a ways off, and given the small-ish audience for Lost Footage, I'm not expecting to raise loads, but I think we can do it with a relatively small budget, if we're clever about it. Part of trying to grow the channel was always with this at the back of my mind; get more people invested in what I do, and they might be more likely to support my more - ahem - avant-garde efforts.

But... for whatever reason... that hasn't really happened, and I'm kinda bored of waiting now, so, y'know, sod it...

Paul