I’ve made a VLOG!

My respect for people that do this sort of thing regularly has increased by an order of magnitude.  This was not easy.

As I state in the video, I wanted to celebrate my 1,000 Twitter follower milestone by creating my first VLOG.  I’ve thought about doing it for years but didn’t really see much point in it.  I’m much more eloquent in text.  However, after some friends posted videos of their own, they encouraged me to do this.  Now, for better or worse, it is done.

There’s stuttering in the video because I tried editing out most of the “uhms.” I didn’t eliminate all of them, but to put this into perspective, I recorded about 5:40 worth of video and edited it down to 5:13.  That’s a lot of awkward pauses.

I made the decision to make the VLOG about a week and a half ago.  Since then, I downloaded some software, recorded some test footage, and finally wrote my “script.” When I woke up this morning, I decided today would be the best day to make the recording.  With beautiful, cool weather to support my decision, it just made sense to go outside and find a quiet place with natural lighting.

The weather behaved, but the rest of the world conspired against me.  I walked to the sleepy little park in my neighborhood thinking that I’d find a bench and record the raw footage there.  As soon as I opened my laptop, a truck turned the corner and rumbled down the street hauling a cement mixer.  It parked less than 100 feet from where I planned on doing the recording.  The mixer churned and growled like bottled thunder.  Then one of my neighbors started drilling.  When a handful of friendly dog walkers showed up and started chatting at and around me, I decided I’d move on.

I visited two other parks before walking home and making the recording in my backyard.  I think it worked out.  If I do another one, I’ll start at home.  Maybe I’ll put up something to block some of the wind noise.

Chris lent me his fancy Snowball microphone which helped improve the “production value.” After a couple of hours spent editing and migrating the files to a place where I could upload to YouTube, I feel like it is finally finished and I can relax.  Maybe even get back to writing.

If you enjoyed this, let me know and I’ll see about making another!