Hobby On Steroids

Chuck Olson is one of my short list of favorite leftybloggers. Oh, his blog Blogumentary is a snarkfest, and goodness knows I would never descend to snarking...

...let me start over. Chuck did the blog documentary Blogumentary, and has a role in some interesting projects: New Patriot, one of the less-sucky local leftyblogs; Minnesota Stories, the biggest/best Minnesota videoblog that I'm aware of (of which more shortly), and finally MNSpeak, the essential Minnesota blog aggregator. Downside: Chuck uses the word "Totally" way too much. Upside: He and his girlfriend Lorika are occasionally found at our blogger and trivia soirees at Keegans, and are genuinely cool people, even though they're totally...er, very wrong about most things political.

He left a comment in this thread:

if any of you guys has a video camera and isn't afraid to use it, please submit a short video to Minnesota Stories. if can be a slice of life, interesting interview or personal story, or even a political rant. for some reason it's hard to find video with a conservative bent -- i would welcome it.

Hmmmm.

I've thought about expanding this blog in one direction or another for a long time. Podcasting is a natural venue for me; I've been doing one form of audio production or another since I was a teenager, and I enjoy it a lot. I need to figure out what's wrong with my laptop, and then figure out how the whole 'pod thing is done in terms of code on the site. My blog goal for this year is to try a podcast. Now, I've heard other peoples' podcasts; Lileks' podcasts are wonderful, as one might expect from someone who brought us the legendary Diner and is perfectionistic enough to edit his home movies - monthly. The guy's a closet producer/editor. This is a good thing for doing audio. There's a time commitment, of course, to doing good audio production - and while I was by no means a great audio producer/engineer back when I did it for a living, I'm blessed and handicapped by the fact that if I do it, I really don't want the output to suck. And it takes time - something I don't have a lot of to spare.

Chuck is talking about videoblogging. I've done video - behind the camera, as an editor, producer and technical director on one cable access production or another, long ago. I have no style; I'm a gearhead, blessed with an ability to figure out how to work other peoples' expensive equipment. But if I absorbed two things, they are...:

• Video is Not Cheap - Cameras cost money - and are pretty much the bare minimum to do videoblogging (unless you do entirely captures of other peoples' video - which is both ethically dicey and also incurs some expenses). No, video people - I've heard you when you say you can get a camera for "...under $1,000" or "...not much over $500" or whatever cameras cost these days (I occasionally scope them out when I'm at Best Buy, for much the same reason that I occasionally saunter through Downtown Jaguar; it's fun to dream). Nothing out of two digits is "cheap"; the $500 I'd spend on a camera is 2-3 months' groceries, a chunk of a mortgage payment, a big chunk of a kid's college fund, a bunch of car insurance (my daughter will be 15 this summer - ugh) and G-d only knows what else. And then there's editing - cheaper nowadays online, but the editing apps usually (but not always) cost money. Money makes the world go around - and sometimes makes it stop, too. And as if that weren't enough...
• Video Eats Time - The old maxim was "for every minute of end product, assume an hour of editing". I'll admit it's an old maxim - I last worked in video in '89 - and that may have changed over time. And there certainly are shortcuts - I used to be good at "editing in the camera", choosing shots very, very carefully so they'd need the minimum of cutting and rearranging later. But the fact remains that doing video takes a ton of time; time to shoot ones footage, more time to edit it into something you'd want people to see. Now, the beauty of traditional blogging - the kind I'm doing now - is that there's almost no overhead; the time I spend writing is pretty much all there is to it. On top of my regular day, with the day job, taking care of two kids, taking care of the house, practicing an instrument or two, and a fair number of the kids and my extracurriculars, the blog's saving grace is that I can do it between 5 and 6:30 in the morning. I might be able to squeeze in a monthly podcast; I have a hard time figuring out how I'd fit in the time to shoot, much less produce, a videoblog.

Which is a shame, because it looks like a cool idea. I'd love to do video; there are a lot of things to be done out there, and I think I could do 'em. I'd just have to let another part of my day go to hell...

As to Chuck's comment - that there's not a lot of video coming from conservatives - that's interesting. I'll withhold the usual snark ("We have jobs!" Nossirree, no snarking here. Won't say it) and simply speculate (that's all it is) that most people who are drawn to the level of passionate activism for conservatism that'd lead them to things like punditry and blogging came up through fields that don't reinforce the sort of artistic sensibility that one'd need to do a good video or audio blog (Lileks is a bad example; he came late to the right; so am I, by the way); conservatives tend to grow up in environments and evolve in fields that...well, foster conservatism (!), fields that (I'm admittedly generalizing here) value left-brain analytical skills over right-brain expressive talents. It is (I don't think I'm too far out of line here) part of the reason you find so few conservative painters and coffee-shop owners and social workers, and so relatively few liberal engineers and financial analysts and actuaries. All generalizations, of course, are false; I'm a conservative who, in a perfect world, would be writing and recording music and would drop everything to get an MA in film if I could (which I can't); I know liberal analysts; again, it's a generalization.

So Chuck: I'd love to do videoblogging. Get back to me in about five years, when my kids are up and out of the house...

Posted by Mitch at December 29, 2005 06:04 AM | TrackBack