I Can't Finish Making a Video

I struggle with making videos. It's not for a lack of desire to; video is my preferred medium for sharing my thoughts, experiences, and ideas, which I love doing.

I wish all the ideas I've had for videos could just appear, direct from my brain to finished edit in a beautifully crafted piece. Alas, that can't be.

Higher Standards, Bigger Failures

The main problem I have with creating finished work is tied to my standards. On top of my UX engineering, I'm also a writer/director. I have high standards for what a video should be. But I can't seem to meet those standards.

The biggest reason: I'm challenged by the editing process on both ends of production. Editing video is something I used to love (it was why I got into film in the first place), but now I dread. Editing scripts into a well-structured piece is draining. I don't feel I have time or patience for either.

(Failing to) Fix it All

I've tried to fix this by doing my videos in one take. Just me and my notes, stream of consciousness. This way, videos are quick and easy to make, which makes me want to make more of them.

Problem: videos are longer, less focused, and less visually interesting. I look at that video and know that I wouldn't watch the full thing, because I take 10 minutes to say what could have taken 5. Those pesky standards come back, looking down on me.

This is often made much worse by the fact that, after recording, I'll often write an article about the video for this website. While doing that, I end up making the point in a much better way.

I find myself wishing I just wrote the article first, then recorded the video using the article as the script. Creating a script beforehand would certainly alleviate the problem of my YouTube analytics telling me viewership drops off precipitously halfway through.

But any time I've tried this workflow, I've failed to finish the video. I've never even finished the script.

I've tried variations on this for months. Use ChatGPT to write a script based on a transcript of my recording. However, ChatGPT has such a distinctly uninteresting voice that I need to rewrite the whole thing to make it sound like me.

I've tried making videos where I record over gameplay, but there's too much dead air when I get focused on gameplay. I've even tried making PowerPoints instead of scripts, but it runs into the same problems as scripts (if not even worse).

None of it has worked. So where do I go from here?

Hitting the Reset Button

It's time to lower my standards.

I posted most consistently (roughly once a month) when I was just using notes and a single take. Since I tried to improve my videos, I've built up a collection of unfinished videos. When I let my standards get in the way, I don't finish videos. An okay video is better finished than a perfect video left unfinished.

An okay video is better finished than a perfect video left unfinished.

I'm always trying to improve. Always trying to find the inefficiencies. Sometimes, fixing the inefficiencies kills the product. At least in my case that's what happened.

Rather than improving, I'm hitting the reset button. Sometimes that's the best you can do.