So the latest video is up. I have been trying to keep a buffer of between one and two weeks between the time I finish the video and the time it goes up on Youtube. However, this latest video ate up all that buffer.
Part of the problem is just that it was so long, around twice as long as my shortest videos, so it took longer to edit together. Also, there’s just a lot more subject to cover, so I had to gather a lot of reference material.
But there were two reasons above all why it took so long. First, I decided to ask my work buddy Sam Carrico, who also has a Youtube channel (and whose youthful enthusiasm for his led me to take mine up again), to interview some of his friends on camera to illustrate the point I wanted to make, and having just started school again, it took him a while to find the time to do it. And once I got the footage from him, it was a completely different kind of challenge to find a way to boil almost 20 minutes of interviews into a minute-and-a-half of comprehensible information. I think it works really well in the finished video, but it took a lot of work.
And second, I decided to add animation to the videos. I had been wanting to do this for a long time, but finally found a way I could afford that could give good results. I had considered springing for the $20-a-month Adobe After Effects subscription, but then I discovered that Blackmagic (the company that makes the awesome free editor I use, Davinci Resolve) also had a video compositing/special effects program called Fusion.
Learning Fusion from scratch was its own special kind of hell, but I ended up making six different animated bits, from a simple custom transition to a fairly elaborate (for a beginner, at least) main title animation. I’m really happy with the results, but once again, a lot of extra work.
So here’s the video, which features the phrase “Trump in a cape” not once, but twice. I hope you enjoy it. I don’t know what I’m doing for next week. I know what video I want to make, but I don’t want to rush it too much, and I really want that buffer back. We’ll see.
