This page contains some of my musings based on my experience making incremental reading commentaries and from some conversations with Mel and Joel Chan on Twitter.
- How do we record the creative process?
- How do we record the creative process when it is spread out over weeks / months?
- How to share details about our workflows in context so that the community can collectively learn and converge on a set of best practices and techniques?
- How do you balance doing creative projects / learning with having to edit videos and record commentaries?
- How can we automate the grunt work involved with content creation so we can focus on what matters?
¶ Related
- I asked a question about the ideal training for a knowledge worker to Andy Matuschak when we interviewed him in the SuperMemo.Wiki Discord in October 2020.
- Could Learning Vlogs assist in building up a "corpus of techniques" for knowledge workers?
- The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer recommended by Raj.
¶ Examples
¶ Devon Crawford's "Developer Vlogs"
- Check out his YouTube channel.
- One of my favorites: He tries to write a program to edit his videos for him.
- Probably the best viewer experience.
- Very entertaining and engaging.
- I like the name "Developer Vlogs".
- Editing workload must be enormous though.
¶ George Hotz's Programming Livestreams
- Archive of his streams available on YouTube.
- Raw footage with live commentary.
- George Hotz's livestrems pretty much the opposite of Devon's videos.
- Very interesting to see the raw footage of a top 0.001% programmer solving problems.
- But the lack of editing means that hardly anyone has time to watch and learn from them.
- Each video only captures one session.
- I suppose you can get a sense of the incremental problem solving process if you watch every stream.
¶ My Incremental Reading Commentaries
- Playlist of my videos
- They only capture one session, so they fail to capture the incremental process.
- Less focussed on a particular problem, more undirected.
- I think more directed problem solving videos would be better because they will naturally contain the story telling elements Mel.
¶ Noticing Some Themes
¶ How much Editing Required?
You want to minimize the time you are spending doing manual video editing. Some form of automation is required, otherwise you will lose your mind - especially if you are recording over months. Also, more time spent doing video editing means less time doing what you actually want to do - learning / creative projects.
¶ Automation
¶ SuperMemo
- SuperMemoAssistant plugin + OBS Studio plugin to start recording automatically when you click on a certain element.
- Is this sane?
- Could you have multiple concurrent projects?
- What if you trigger recording once by clicking on one project's element, then click on another project's element.
- Would you share the footage?
¶ Single Session vs Multiple Sessions?
Devon records across multiple sessions. This gives a way better sense of the creative process.
¶ Focussed Problem Solving vs Unfocussed Exploration
I think focussed problem solving is way more engaging.
¶ Telling a Story
- Mel suggested that the footage should tell a story to make it engaging.
I agree. I think focussed problem solving will naturally create these story elements.