Retakes

The content I post to the Coffee Break Member Area is supposed to be a little less polished, what will hopefully be insightful commentary or behind-the-scenes looks at things, but way less editing. Once you start editing things to a polished state, it starts to create reasons why you can’t get something started. 

Releasing content is hard. We often hold ourselves to a high standard and there are endless tweaks and debate on whether I should re-record or re-edit something. And really, I consider myself one of the ones that is less hard on themselves - I know my YouTube videos aren’t perfect, but they reach the good enough status and they get out there. 

But my videos still have scripts, they still have lots and lots of retakes, and they have a lot of “uhms” and awkward pauses edited out to get to the final product that is ready for release. This is just one of the reasons this Member Area will be good for me! Hopefully helping me get more comfortable with freeform and natural camera presence.

Did you watch my Welcome video? The one that thanks you for joining and gives an introduction where things are at on the site? Yes - the one that I posted was unedited, you can even see me starting the recording and ending the recording, I didn’t even trim the start and end out. Because I’m trying to teach myself to be myself and do what I said I would do with this Member Site, release unpolished videos where the message was more important than the edit.

Do you know how many takes I did of that welcome video? Nine. Nine takes. First, I started and I slipped into my robotic, script voice. Oops. Not what I wanted. Then I got going, and I felt good, but then I did my YouTube video trick of when I mess up, pause, then restart and I know I can fix it in the edit. But I didn’t want to edit the video, I wanted to record and post. So I started again. Another false start. Let’s start again. I finally got it, one take, not too many awkward moments and it now lives on the Video page as the Welcome message.

Life of a content creator!  ;)