who up workin they flow

I recently got recommend a video about some musicians and their workflows. Normally I try not to watch videos like that for the simple reason that I only want to take advice from artists I look up to, as they actually make things I like. But I decided to watch it and did manage to get a good take away. They bring up a quote that some musician said; "Thought is the enemy of flow." This is a concept ive thought about a lot but never articulated in a concise way. Whenever I edit I try to have someone else to talk with. When I edit alone I tend to come up with a idea and then immediately think about if its a good idea or not. This stops my flow and instead of letting myself pour out idea after idea, I only let one drop fall and then stop to screen it, then let another drop fall, so on and so forth. Writing one sentence at a time and then polishing it, instead of just writing a full first draft. Having people with me stops this from happening most the time as my goal is no longer to discern if a bit is funny, but to just make my friends laugh in the moment and then saying a new bit/joke. Having people to joke with really helps me stop me from getting in my head too much. I think really thinking bits through is a good thing overall, but when it comes to spitballing and getting words down on the page its a hindrance.

In the same vein, I am changing my workflow when it comes to edits/anims that take more than 15 minutes to complete. My normal workflow when making a new video is really good up until I get into making fully finalized bits. I normally start a video by dropping all 250 clips (my old standard that I am changing and will talk about) and then cutting them down and removing any obviously unnecessary or bad clips. This can take around 4-8 hours to do depending on how thoroughly I want to trim in the first past. Once everything is cut I then watch through and mark any clips that I feel need an edit or that I already have edit ideas for. During this time I also try to come up with bit ideas while reviewing. This whole process tends to take only 1-2 days and by the end roughly half the markers will have a description of a edit I have in mind of the clip. From here I would start doing basic edits like sound or panning edits, and then progressively finish more and more complex and difficult ones until I was done. During this time I would come up with edits for all the clips marked without descriptions. My issue here is that I'm only following through on the drafts workflow for the first couple of passes. As soon as things are marked I then begin inhibiting my flow by finishing each idea to completion, not just making storyboards. From now on I'm gonna go through all the edits I have marked and make draft versions of them, just enough to convey the idea with its timing. That way I can revise and have everything planned out and thought through so that when I start finalizing them there is no guess work in what the bits timing or the animations blocking should be. Everything after than can just be worked on with my autopilot artist brain, the same way the hardest part of drawing is the line work and the coloring afterwards is (mostly) second nature and intuition. As I work now, when I animate I have to judge if the camera angles, posing, timings I came up with in my head hold up when put on the page. If I do storyboard anims for every animation, if I dont like something down the line I can change it without having to be delicate with it. I can just make a new storyboard in like an hour. Currently im basically locking myself into a half baked idea when I commit to working on a anim, having to both animate with my intuition and at the same time, question the piece in context of the bit. Very flow inhibiting to say the least. This would also let me simply leave some animations as storyboards if I dont think they need more, saving myself time and effort that could be better relegated elsewhere. Also having everything timed out with rough audio would let me pick music sooner in the process instead of thinking "Damn I finished the video, all it needs is music and a thumbnail now. It is late though so i should sleep" -and then proceeding to stay up the next 8 hours picking music and uploading when the sun is rising. It would just let my video be done when I finish the last bit which would be a lot nicer on my mind in those 24 hours before uploading.

My second major change is the amount of clips I want to use. When I first started making videos I made a arbitrary decision that every video would be cut from 250 clips. That worked for a long time but my standards have risen, both in the clips I save and also the time im willing to give each bit, leading to my videos getting longer and longer. This wouldn't be too bad but its kinda like putting all your eggs into one basket. If a video takes me 4-6 months to make and I only get one thumbnail and title combo to entice people, if that thumbnail sucks I've essentially shot myself in the foot. Making the videos with around 100 clips would let me make videos twice as fast, have them be roughly 10-15 minutes long, and give me more chances to make thumbnails. A flopped video hurts a lot less when it only took 2 months instead of 4. The main reason I haven't done less clips sooner is about cohesion. The less clips I use the less variety I get in terms of emotion and the less opportunities I get to tie clips into each other. This also why I cant just cut the video im working on in half, it was made as a whole within the context of all the other clips within it. Cutting it in half would make it feel less than the sum of its parts, like something is missing. If the next tf2 video I make this way goes well, then I'll make it my new standard, but for now I gotta finish this little beast im workin on.

Ive also been meaning to also finish the Helldivers video ive been working on. I really think that im just being too precious with it. Im being of the mindset that the overall quality of clips needs to be that of my main channel videos, which just isnt true. After being stumped on the video for a week I spent a single night in a call with friends and did what I talked about beforehand with spitballing, but since the edits are less complex I just made them as soon as I came up with them. I think theyre still funny, they convey the ideas I want but just arent pretty. I just need to be fine with that. A quick and dirty video for the second channel is fine as long me and my friends laugh when we watch it, that should be my metric for quality.

About the second channel though, a part of me got worried that the frag video was doing well on there. The idea that I should have uploaded it to the main channel was something I kept thinking about. In my mind I equated view count with quality, which is not how it works btw. As an artist you also give yourself the job of being a marketer. Of course you dont have to care if other people see your work, thats a good mindset to have when starting out. But if you believe your art has merit and is worth peoples time, I feel that its your obligation to let as many people experience your art as you can. If you dont, youre just denying the world of something beautiful and unique. But this doesnt mean that good art alone is enough to get eyes on it. As an artist it feels weird to act as a marketer, for many artist myself included, it feels like youre betraying the sanctity of your art by viewing it through the corporate lens of marketing. I still think there is a lot for me to unpack with why that video doing well stressed me out, I am already thinking of a lot of reasons as to why, but this post is already pretty damn long and I can flesh out my thoughts more in a post where this is the focus, not a passing mention.

I should have the helldivers video out in a week. Its basically fully done just need the music cuts and a thumbnail, but i also wanna animate the tf2 video aswell so we'll see. Anyways i go see how many golfballs my hungry hungry garbage disposal yearns for bibibibibibi