I've tried a lot of different kinds of content on all the social media platforms, and I keep finding myself unsatisfied with the lightweight creations that their limitations require. I'd spend days making those video poems for Instagram—writing the verse, recording the music, editing the footage—and then watch it play back on a tiny vertical slot smothered by the interface, a short blip jammed between memes to be scrolled past with the sound off and forgotten—and I'd think...this isn't worth it.
These frantic mobile platforms aren't the place for anything substantial, and I'm tired of pouring all that energy into bite-size aesthetic fluff.
One thing I haven’t really explored yet is visual storytelling. For a few years now on Patreon, I’ve been warming up to talking on camera, sharing thoughts and tales about my strange new life in the wilderness, and that’s been gratifying. But Patreon is a walled garden with a very limited audience and almost no opportunity for growth. I love my tiny community, and I love sharing casual stories and private ponderings there, but it never really made sense to produce grand creations for that platform.
I decided I want to try something new: pouring serious effort into long form videos on the only platform that still encourages works of heft and substance. Yes, believe it or not, that’s YouTube.
YouTube is filled with trash like everywhere else, but it has a serious side too. It allows and even encourages long and thoughtful videos, the kind you can put on in the background while you fold your laundry. It’s the ONLY major platform that doesn’t radically alter your content with random cropping and intrusive overlays, the only platform built around horizontal video—the natural orientation of the actual world we live in—and it even plays in full screen, almost as if it wants you to sit down and focus on one video instead of constantly nudging you to keep scrolling.
This fits the vibe I’m pursuing these days. I want to make substantial things, because when you make a substantial thing, it’s satisfying just to complete it and release it, to know it’s in the world even if it doesn’t “succeed.” When I write a short story that gets buried in an anthology and never mentioned again, I feel a little bleak and sad, like it never really happened. When I write a novel that hardly anyone reads, there’s still the satisfaction of knowing I created something that stands on its own, resting patiently on a shelf, proclaiming its existence to whoever might discover it in the future.
So I’ve started making YouTube videos about my experiences out here in the wilderness, living alone in a shed and slowly losing touch with society while I build a home and talk to deer and look at weird bugs. I’m putting real effort into these videos, with real editing and real music that I’m writing and recording for each one. It’s been exhilarating to blend all the art skills I’ve collected over the years—music, writing, photography—into one medium where they can alchemize into something I haven’t done before. And because these videos are about my own life, not fictional characters, I feel a unique warmth in sharing them with you.
I admit, it gets lonely out here. Making these videos is one way for me to keep my seat around the human campfire.
