I enjoyed my weekend in Gdansk in November but I’ve felt like I haven’t written enough about it, while simultaneously feeling like I don’t know what on Earth to say. One day I’ll write another blog or two on the subject. But does it even it out a little that this post is about Gdansk, even if it isn’t quite an actual blog post? You see, I made a Gdansk vlog and here it is:
I’ve been wanting to try making videos for years. In 2012, I made a collection of little 3D clips around Iceland that I subsequently discovered I couldn’t edit – I know, 3D sounds like I was trying to run before I could walk but I’d never possessed a camera capable of making video and what I had was a 3D camcorder that came free with the shiny 3D TV my dad had bought, presumably because there was so little to watch in 3D that they’d decided to give you the means of making your own entertainment.
When I went to Tallinn in 2015, I got as far as setting up a camera on the grass outside Riga airport while I waited for my delayed connecting flight… but then filmed precisely nothing else. In 2016, I did succeed in making two tiny mini videos of my day at Myvatn Nature Baths and of my evening at Jokulsarlon, the glacier lagoon. Actually, I made a slightly larger video incorporating those two and some other stuff but then I stuck my legal name at the end of it and put it on Facebook and I haven’t got round to editing those last few seconds back out so I can put it here.
I made a small vlog of my day on the Isle of Wight in the summer. It’s very heavy on the hovercraft, which was my reason for going there in the first place and I was pleased enough with that to make plans to do Russia videos, including a daily video diary but then… I didn’t do that either.
But I made a Gdansk vlog! Ok, I mostly forgot to film anything during the day once I actually got to the city but you can’t built on foundations if you don’t have any foundations and so baby’s first travel video was born.
When I was in my final year at university, my housemates wanted to put a video of me and Jemma sledding in Switzerland on “a website” – YouTube was just well enough known that they wanted to do that and Jemma didn’t know what “the website” was called. Back then, you could talk about the possibility of having your own TV show. I’d kind of like to from little five minute videos overlayed with library music up to a TV series, albeit one with very short and very irregular episodes. I’m not quite sure what that would look like but I guess it would feature a bit more of me and a bit more research.
VIdeo is never going to become my primary media. I don’t like talking to the camera and I’ve made it very evident that I’m no good at remembering to film regularly, whereas I do like writing and have had the next month’s worth of blogs finished and scheduled for so long that I honestly can’t tell you when I wrote most of them. But I’d like for videos to start popping up more often and I’ve even gone so far as to invest in the cheapest most basic beginner’s GoPro – my 2016 Myvatn video was filmed on a cheapy action cam which was fine for my purposes, except its habit of freezing over, in which case all you could do to reset it was wait for the battery to run out.That effectively made it unusable. I’m hoping an actual reputable GoPro won’t have that problem.
I mean, I plan to have a media empire eventually. I have this blog. I’m writing my second book. I’m exploring video. I’m trying and failing to write songs, although I won’t be recording them, not properly. I’ve got some watercolour sketches in my Russia scrapbook and I’d like to do more of them but I am so, so bad at drawing that no one else gets to see them.
In short… there may be more videos coming.