It's only been a couple days since my town started isolating due to the coronavirus (schools closed this week and may remain closed for a while), but I'm already starting to feel incredibly bored. Usually I'm content with staying home on my phone all day, but now that it's my only option, it's gotten old fast. Irony, right?
With so much time to kill, I decided to try to stay productive. It didn't take long to think of an idea. My mom is an artist, and in the past year, she's developed and begun teaching a class centering around how to get into the habit of daily painting. The main message of the class is that in order to truly improve at something, repetition is key. Creating 100 small paintings will make you a better artist than creating one larger masterpiece. Basically, don't strive for perfection; instead, work on the consistency that will push you to be a better lifelong painter.
I don't paint, but I do like making music. I started a YouTube channel for covers and original songs a while back, but with school and extracurriculars I haven't been able to keep it consistent. Up until last week, I hadn't posted a new video in over 7 months. On Saturday, though, I decided to apply my mom's painting philosophy to my YouTube channel.
I made a short video to announce my plan: making and posting 14 videos to my YouTube channel in the next 14 days. You can watch it below.
It sounds simple (I thought it would be simple too, when I thought of the challenge idea). But it's actually far from it! Every day for the past 3 days, I've been taking what's usually a two or three week process for me and condensing that into one day.
Usually a video consists of shooting, re-shooting, recording audio, editing audio, syncing audio and video, editing video, and posting to YouTube, not to mention selecting a song—or writing one—and learning it. But I've learned that in order to make this challenge work, I need to lower my expectations slightly. Take today's video, a cover I recorded of "La Vie en Rose". Originally, I planned to record an original song, but I realized that I wouldn't have time for that for the level of production I expected of myself for an original song.
Instead, I picked a song I'd learned a while ago, which I already had more or less memorized. In lieu of recording audio separately like I usually do, I took my microphone and computer outside to my shooting location and did both the video shooting and audio recording together. It only took me three takes to get one that worked!
The final product (which I embedded above) is definitely of lesser quality than what I am used to. There were a couple glitches in the video and a couple spots where my voice wasn't the best. Ultimately, though, I know that for this challenge, consistency is key over quality. In the long run, finishing this challenge and seeing the level of output I'm capable of as an artist is going to do more for me than posting one perfect video...and then nothing for eight months.
So far, I've finished three videos out of fourteen for my two-week challenge. Wish me luck!