Stream-of-Consciousness or “What Am I Doing This Summer”?
It’s 2am and sleep is not really in sight. Well, sort of, but iTunes e-mailed me and told me that my pre-order of Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown was available for download and I just started listening to it and damn it’s good and who stops listening to such a good album in the middle? You’ve got to hear it through all at once to fully take it in, and so I’m left with needing to find something to do for the next 1.2 hours. (OK, since doing the math tells me that that takes me ’til 3:30am maybe I will have to cut it short mid-album. But we’ll decide that later.)
Anyway. Final exams are over and I’m pretty sure I failed at least two of them, and quite possibly both the classes that said finals were in. But I don’t really care. I got a much better grade than I was expecting in another class, so that’s awesome.
So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my summer. Because sleeping 12 hours well into the afternoon is awesome for only one or two days. So that was today, and now it’s time to move on to bigger and better things (hopefully things that don’t entail sleeping quite so much of the day away). I’ve been feeling for a while that I’d like to focus more on teaching myself more about filmmaking, from actual camera-work and stuff to editing (I loooove editing, but I don’t feel like I know Premiere Pro nearly as well as I could) and post-production stuff (After Effects, anyone?), so that’s something to do with the summer, but then the question becomes what kind of structure to put it in? E.g. what kind of raw video footage do I use for my editing adventures? old family vacation footage, or shoot new footage? If so, what?
Those are the questions.
Enter the awesome web video series that I found yesterday called The Guild created by the awesome Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, anyone? She was in that). While watching all 24 6-8 minutes episodes of this little web video that won three awards at the Streamy Awards, I got to thinking: what about spending the summer creating little web video episodes? Obviously this brings up as many (or more) question than it answers, but at least we’re going in the direction of making progress on the question of what the shrack to do this summer. And to help answer some of those questions, we find that not only does Felicia have a blog, she’s currently posting on how to do a web series and make it work. One begins to wonder if this is some sort of sign.
(Click “read more” to read more of my middle-of-the-night rambles.)
So let’s look at some of the questions raised by the possibly of doing a sort-of web series this summer:
- Do I want to commit to that kind of structure? E.g. I start “series” projects a lot and I don’t always finish them. Very rarely, actually. (Remember my big Transit in America blog post series last fall? No? Neither did I.) This is a good question to mull over. I think if I were to try my hand at this type of thing I’d keep it very open-ended and not try to hype it up that much as a more-than-once thing lest I lose interest and face. Hence the “sort-of” stipulation in the statement at the beginning of this list. So bottom line: if I keep it unstructured there’s no problem. I tend to like to give myself unnecessary structure, so I’d need to keep myself in line in that regard.
- What would this hypothetical “sort-of” web series be about? That’s the most pressing issue right now. And the one with the least amount of answer so far. I think an afternoon out in the hammock with a notebook and iPod could solve this issue very quickly, though. (New plan for tomorrow afternoon….)
- Do I have time for this? I think this depends on how much structure I give this little project, so it depends on the answer to #1. If I leave it open-ended and don’t hold myself to one episode a week or month or whatever I could have time for it. Playing with video all summer is after all my most firm summer plan so far.
Huh. Maybe there aren’t actually that many questions. Just confidence that needs to be built up within myself and details that need to be straightened out. Preliminarily it looks like I might be doing some kinda semi-structured video series this summer, though. Stay tuned. This could be really fun.
Oh yeah, other plans for the summer:
- Reorganize and/or relocate bouma-holtrop.com and other sundry website stuff.
- Beef up my computing toys. E.g. buy more!
- Other things.
That’s all I got for now. Goodnight.
-j
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