Making A Digital Artefact: What I Learned

This was written for the University subject, BCM114.

Over the past several months, I have been developing a portfolio of work which I have centralised here on this blog. In addition to multiple reviews and essays among other works, I have also written a number of posts about the process of creating the content itself - starting with the post 'Construction Of A Video Thumbnail'. In it, I showed the process by which I use Adobe Photoshop to create thumbnails for videos. I also declared my enthusiasm for creating that Overview or History of the Amiga video.

That video never came to light.

Which is not to say that it never will, but it became clear that editing videos like that would be far too time-consuming to make regularly (which incidentally, is a point I noted in a separate blog post on the matter).

Although I did upload a video essay which I was largely satisfied with, to continue to upload in this fashion would probably burn me out pretty quickly.

So, came the next bold (no pun intended) idea.

A podcast!

Considering I already had a podcast idea and an episode already released, I decided to surreptitiously lift my own idea-I MEAN, intentionally integrate my preexisting podcast into my already existing content. Thus came Plan No. 2, in the form of a checklist.

From late August 2018 onwards, my 'content priority list' was (and still is) as follows:

1. The podcast (tied, in terms of priority)

1. Text/visual reviews (tied, in terms of priority)

2. Text/visual essays

3. Video essays

4. Video reviews

So, this is where I'm at as of right now. In less than three months, my content saw a rapid change from video essays to sometimes video essays, but mainly a whole bunch of other stuff. Not to mention viewer metrics also remained pretty solid as well.

Below: the current look of all my 'avenues of content'.

In that time, the progress of my work was never firmly set in stone nor was it linear in any fashion. As sure as I was that my first idea was solid, it still found a way to fail. But that's a good thing. Because it drew me to the realisation about how any form of creation is never developed from start to finish in an easy to follow step-by-step fashion. Instead, it's chaotic, uneven and oftentimes frustrating - but I guess that's all just part of the learning experience, and it ended up making my work far stronger and far more interesting than it would have been otherwise. At least, in my opinion.

So, that's my piece. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make a lot more content for a week or two now, having been tied up with other work. But in the coming weeks, expect content from me very soon!

Until then, this is Timothy, signing off...