Goals For Praxis Video Project Month 2

For this project, I had a list of goals I wanted to accomplish so I want to review those and go over how those have changed in the past month and what I’ve accomplished

The first one was to build up an actual art portfolio I could use in the future on my website. Since the beginning of this challenge I have created 9 pieces that I will for sure be using in the future and 3 others I am considering adding as well. Altogether that makes 12 original pieces I can and am planning to use. Each one took a lot of time and required a large amount of creativity to make.

 Goal two for this project was to test out a new kind of video on my personal YouTube channel. That is definitely what I did. Sadly, the results have not been as successful as I had hoped. My view count actually dropped in comparison to my older videos. Although I have enjoyed the process I believe that the art side of YouTube is rather oversaturated at the moment and the energy required to continue this simple kind of video on a channel would be a very massive amount to gain any sort of momentum unless you use a very unique take on such videos.

The third goal I  had, was to boost my YouTube analytics. Although I knew that simply uploading a video every day would help to boost the analytics in my favor this required some extra research, especially once I realized I was no longer getting as many views on the new type of videos. So I began to look into Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). I’ll go into more detail on that in a little while.

The fourth goal was to create more content in general. That seems pretty self-explanatory.

Number five was to boost my skills as an artist. I spent a lot of time watching other YouTubers give tips and trick and began to realize and be more conscious of my personal style and what I tend to lean towards when it comes to art which is something I personally never spent a lot of time thinking about until this project.

 Goal six oh my gosh. This goal is probably where I have noticed the most improvement and let’s be honest this is where I needed it. I wanted to get better at video editing and creating explainer videos. At the beginning of this month, It took me about an hour to edit each video. A lot of that had to do with the fact that I was using a rather out of date video editor (Windows Movie Maker Live) which got the job done but very inefficiently. Because of the capacity of my old laptop, I wasn’t able to download an editor that could run on it. To fix my problem I upgraded equipment and learned how to use I Movie in the span of one day so that I didn’t interrupt my video flow. Now when I edit a video it takes me only as long as the video plus about 10 to 15 minutes. Compared to the hour or 2 it used to take me before the switch. I also found that when I am explaining steps in my tutorials I have less awkward pauses so the video itself-requires less editing.

The last Goal for this project was to improve my teaching and communication skills. This has a lot to do with my personal style I used to use in speech and debate of making things so simple that no matter how complicated a debate case was to make sure that the judge was never confused. Thanks to that experience I was able to translate that into my videos. I even had a friend tell me that “I am a horrible artist, but I feel like if I followed your steps I may be able to actually draw something for once in my life!” I also noticed after the first week I no longer searched for words as often while making the tutorials. I have really enjoyed seeing the improvements I’ve made in all the different ways.