I think I wrote months ago that I wanted to start producing a series of short videos about whatever kind of silly nonsense I felt like talking about, and get the family involved. There were already some obvious things to cover, like Lego building and drink making, and hopefully there are other things I haven't thought of yet. And given my general disdain for Google, you would rightly expect that I'll use my box of tools to build my own thing around it, depending on Google mostly for ad serving and discovery, but owning everything else. I can spin up a web site to embed videos on in a few minutes, and even create a forum just as fast. The other part is whipping up a logo and doing some simple animation just to give it all a little polish.
It's amazing how hard that last part is. That's true for virtually everything that's a truly creative endeavor. I've been trying to write another screenplay for more than a decade, and all I have to show for it are incongruent fragments written down in several places. For that reason, I have the greatest respect for people who do it for a living. I haven't cracked the code for a way to make this easier.
Well, maybe there's one thing. I've been forcing myself to write here more, at least once a day on average, and that does help. I'm not sure if it helps because I'm exercising those muscles, or because it's like a brain enema that forces me to clear my brain of shit. Maybe it's a little of both. It comes in bursts. Last weekend, I turned the kitchen into a TV studio and shot the standup (sitdown?) for one of those Lego videos, so once I edit and have a place for it, I'm basically there and I have the template for others.
Boy is my After Effects knowledge rusty though. I'm using it for the really basic logo animation I'm doing. Crazy how creating a simple mask is a skill that I lost. Fortunately, there are countless videos on the Internets about it (for which Google is keeping most of the ad revenue for).
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