The new Bananabelly video is finally done. Well it’s baking in the CPU oven. Encoding and rendering for about 5 hours so far. My computer is so old. At least it has 7 cores. I have the hot lust for 4K 60 but I have the reasonable technology for 1080P 30. So everything takes 5 hundred (thousand) times as long to do. It’s like I press a mouse button and clunk, there’s a silent echo into a perilous RAM chasm, and then what seems like 3 minutes later a frame redraws on the screen, even when using ultra low res previews.
The lessons to be learned. It’s a balance between getting the job done and tweaking it to be just about right, but not just right. Just right means I would never finish. It would be from The beginning of the Silmarillion to the end of The Hunger Games before I released a video.
Building a YouTube channel is not a light matter, especially if you’re a laughing hyena in your imagination like me, with a million twists and turns and pops and snaps on the editing timeline every nanosecond. It’s the time it takes to organize and prioritize large projects. The ideal is to release two videos a week or more. I can reach way more cretins, droolers, and nematodes (lovable euphemisms for audiences) online than I can in a comedy club.
Now there are different ways to make comedy, to be humorous, or to style something comically; and the genres of video webshows and live standup comedy are two widely separated mediums. Since my brain is sporadic and my thoughts blend together in an abstract continuum and I have a hard time compartmentalizing, it’s much more difficult for me to compose a live delivery joke package and thus much more tiring and discombobulating to do standup than to create videos. I mean, probably most people won’t understand Bananabelly videos anyway because of the spazz barf mode execution I tend to exude. But that is not the goal, or the point or the intention. I refute myself of the previous statement. Most if not all will understand Bananabelly videos because it is a medium in which I can express the natural flow of my thoughts through the video making process and so I will express them properly and people will like it and laugh dammit. That is the goal and the intention. And it will be achieved.
Standup comedy is a specific magic trick. You have to want to be able to convince the incidental group of strangers haphazardly assembled in front of you in that particular moment to laugh. You have to get this knack for drawing it out in that exact context: dark room, bright spotlight, drunk people in chairs, amplified speakers. It’s much different than a television show, where there are so many options and possibilities due to the much higher numbers of factors, from writing and story, to characters and visuals, and effects, sounds, music, colors lighting, and, you get the idea.
But to my point: I have to get more shows/episodes/videos up on YouTube in a faster more efficient pace and organize my resource libraries much better. I mean you can spend over two hours like a dumb monkey at a banana museum just picking the musical background track for a 15 second interlude in a 5 minute video. But it’s gotta be the right one. So I resolve to increase the efficiency engines and organization, the decision making and finishing of productions so that I will give viewers something that I want to and that they will find that they want over time as well. To grow my viewers into droolers is the ultimate outcome. Millions of thirsty bananabellering howlers eyeballing and earworming my and Heidi’s creations.
So without any other computer oven glitches, the multiplicitous editing horror of Bananabelly’s Pumpkin Patch Halloween Special will be done and posted today, this afternoon. Oh I think I hear my editing computer coming in for a landing right now… the turbines have stopped roaring. Happy Bellying.