Category: Creativity

My “Opus de Salvia” YouTube video

Posted on by Cloudless

Today I released the Salvia video I’ve been working on. I’m uncharacteristically nervous and excited about seeing how well this video does on the platform. It is the culmination of my summer project of shooting lots of salvia videos (and smoking lots of salvia obviously), as well as the last couple of months of studying YouTube and video editing and leveling up my video production game. 

What I’m nervous about is what happens if after all of this work I put into this particular video, it, like my last several videos, gets like 200 views? Now it might sound kind of pathetic to put all this expectation and ego into some arbitrary YouTube metric; one could make the argument that it’s childish. But I’ve found YouTube creation to be very rewarding, and challenging in a healthy way in the last two months. Which is why just being rewarded by a few thousand views on this particular video would be meaningful positive reinforcement for the direction I’m going creatively.

So enjoy the video, and wish me luck!

Stop Go Stop Go

Posted on by Cloudless

Late last night, instead of sleeping I was learning about YT shorts (videos under 60 seconds long which are marketed differently by the YT algorithm) and it occurred to me that I could make short stop-motion films and publish them as shorts. I’ve been interested in stop-motion for a long time and have had an idea for a series in the back of my head for a couple years. The basic premise is a play-doh character that realizes he’s made of play-doh and runs around trying to convince everyone else that they’re made of play-doh too, which they are, but few believe him. 

So instead of going to sleep at a reasonable time I got up and made a claymation film.

Audience first art 

Posted on by Cloudless

A few recent developments in my creative life:

For my new website I think I’m leaning toward a minimalist, black and white website design. It’s counter intuitive, flexible, and highlights the content…. and pretty easy, which is nice too. 

Second, I want to lean away from drugs in my work. Not to say I’ll hide it, or erase my old material, but I feel like I’m becoming a drug associated figure like Snoop Dog or Cheech and Chong, which isn’t where I want to be. 

Third, I ran into this YT development video where the creator started a whole new channel to see how quickly he could build a successful channel from nothing. He was crazy successful, getting like 3k subscribers in 3 months or so.

More importantly was his method. Instead of thinking “I want to make these videos, I hope someone watches them.” He first choose what audience he wanted to appeal too, then asked what videos those people want. He even developed 4, functional audience members with hopes and fears and tastes to represent his new audience. Then shot videos for that hypothetical audience. This blew me away. What a brilliant way of constructing art! 

Now I’m trying to discern not my creative identity, but the identity of my audience. I love this. I’m so tired of navel gazing, self absorbed art and this seems like a way out of that.