Making the Garage Journal Videos

Those who have met me in person know that I'm not the most outgoing person in the world. In fact, unless I make a concerted effort to fake being an extrovert, I tend to be quiet, low key, even shy. Going in front of the camera with the rules I use for the Garage Journal videos is definitely a weird experience for me.

It's not that I have much trouble with public speaking; with a bit of an academic background you have to learn to speak to your peers and, occasionally, to larger groups. It's been a while since I've had to do it, and even when I did it more frequently I always had a bit of the butterflies in the stomach feeling, but it usually went OK. No, that's not it. The issue is the video artifact itself. Seeing myself on camera and listening to my recorded voice is always a bit jarring. I pick up on the weird quirks and mannerisms I wish I didn't have, and cringe about stutters, awkward phrasings, where I put my hands, and of course any mistakes I make on the topic at hand. Honestly, if I were to try to edit these videos I'd probably just scratch them altogether.

The GJ videos are a bit of an exercise for me (actually, this whole website is). A hard stare in the mirror, if you will. To avoid all the second guessing and hand-wringing, I have a set of rules for the videos:

No cuts. This is an all or nothing affair. I have dropped a couple of false starts, until I settled on the "Hello and welcome!" routine, but that's pretty much it. Once I'm past the five second mark I probably won't be starting again.
No practice runs. Whatever I do in the videos other than the greeting will be the first time I'm doing it.
No scripts. There's a list of topics, but just bullet points.
No time limits. I'll take however long it takes me to explore whatever bullet point I'm talking about.
No fluff. I know, given the two entries currently published, the viewer may disagree with that! But it's not intentional fluff. I really don't care if the video comes out at three minutes long; it just so happens that, if I'm doing a journal, there's probably a topic I'm interested in talking about, which might lead to longer expositions. I like to talk about the stuff that I like to talk about! Sorry.

I could summarize the rules with the word "unfiltered," and that would be close.

There are also technical challenges I'm still trying to address. The biggest of them is sound quality, I think. This is something that affects my in-car recordings as well. I'm just not very familiar with the tech around this, and some education will be necessary. Also, as I look at it, sound recording turns out to be a deeper topic than I thought it would. That's partly because I don't have a workflow for any of this, and need to put more effort into researching a good reference workflow to start from. Something else to research in my copious free time.

Video quality, specially lighting, has been tricky as well. My garage is not the best of places for recording video; the lighting I have in there would be insufficient even if it weren't partially obscured by storage hanging from the ceiling. Daylight recording is the only option at the moment, but at least the light direction is pretty good most of the day.

Happily, video editing is pretty simple, thanks to the "no cuts" rule. If you ever want to meet a user interface that assumes you already know a lot about what you'll be working on, try Final Cut. It's right up there with CAD software. It makes sense that it is that way, since it's a tool designed to optimize a very specific set of tasks, but it can be a source of frustration. So it's nice that the GJs are a lot simpler than the occasional multiple-camera videos I put together from my autocross runs. Final Cut is not all bad, though. Learning the simple techiniques I need to edit my videos does give me a sense of accomplishment.

Overall I'm happy with the videos I've made so far, flaws and all. I have a roadmap for technical improvement, whenever I can get around to doing the research. I also have plans for guests, eventually, which I think would be a lot of fun to record.

Having fun is a crucial aspect of working on the Clueless Racer project.