A Blast from the Past.
I was listening to a video about to troubles with being a mid-Tier YouTube (someone around the 10,000-100,000 subscriber count usually) and trying not to feel a little bitter about being on YouTube for almost 15 years with over a hundred videos (plus almost 80 on the 60 Seconds to Comply channel) and I’ve never broke more then 43 subscribers.
This is not a call for action but it made me reflect to the very first video I ever posted to the channel, a digital art showcase of some of the photoshop work I had done the previous 10-12 years.
I should quickly add a caveat that most of the first set of images were for a political satire show on public access Channel 31 in Perth; this is not to excuse the content but to clarify some of the context as what they were created for, and whilst I wasn’t the one making the joke titles I was responsible for the imagery.
Watching this video again is a mixed bag of feelings like the usual stuff I don’t like, stuff I could do better, and to stuff that makes me laugh, etc. The difference this time is I’m a bit less harsh on myself because for the most part at this point I was almost entirely self taught and the older me knows a lot better ways of creating the same images.
What’s disappointing is that this isn’t the video I’ve ever created (my second ever is a picture slideshow advertisement) but my first short film that I took down after being copyright struck in the early days, back before I know way more about IP and fair use. I used a funny song and created a short around it and never thought it would end up on the internet until I put it up, I’m sure it’s on a disc somewhere along with all the original files used in the above video.
Regardless of everything I can’t help but feel proud of the work I produced, which feels weird in many ways as I don’t think it’s the most technically competent work even for the standard of the day, I never got any work out of anything I did like this, and yet it feels like a foundation of work that I would produce later on with a better understanding of Photoshop (plus it’s own technical jumps from I first started to use it).
S
