This turned out to be a longer post than I had originally intended, but I was having so much fun writing, I couldn’t stop!
My decision to become an online content provider didn’t happen overnight. It had roots in previous attempts at documenting projects over a span of many years. My first attempt was with a co-worker who wanted to build a rocking horse for his young son. I convinced him that with my guidance and help, he could build a much better rocking horse than he could buy. So, he purchased the materials and a set of full-size plans, and using a VHS camcorder we began filming the build in my shop at night after our “real” jobs. I guess the project turned out to be too ambitious, and or, his wife got tired of the late nights after a couple of weeks, but he stopped coming to the shop and the project fell by the wayside. Several years later I gave the uncompleted project to a female co-worker who had enrolled in an adult wood shop program at the local community college. I think her real objective was to meet some interesting guys, and from the stories she told there seemed to be no shortage of men in the shop offering to help her with the project. I don’t know if that rocking horse ever got completed.
Several years later, I started writing a book chronicling the build of 3 Mission style Spindle Morris chairs. I completed 4 chapters of the book, which followed the build through the chair legs, side rails, and spindles, and then I got sidetracked. I still have the uncompleted chairs, sitting in my storage shed, and someday I do plan on finishing them.
Those early documentation attempts fell by the wayside due to many reasons. The time constraints of raising a family and advancing a career, and not the least of all, the lack of, or complexity of the technology available to me at the time. Fast forward 30 years and the kids are grown up, and I’ve retired. Suddenly, like overnight, I have the time; and technology has also evolved to a point where it is now easier than ever before to create and distribute online content.
I’d always planned to spend more time in the shop when I retired, but starting a whole new venture as an online content provider with the time and effort that would require was not a decision to be made lightly. I’d previously enjoyed the process of building and documenting, and strangely enough despite the work involved, had found the process to be very cathartic. I also think the process of documenting one’s work forces you to be a better woodworker; knowing that once published, your work and methods are going to be intensely scrutinized by the woodworking community.
I chewed on the idea for several months after I retired, and finally decided to jump into the deep end of the pool. Now my thought process shifted from “should I”, to “what do I do now?” I knew I wanted to produce YouTube videos, and have a supporting website where I could post Sketchup drawings and blog about related issues, and eventually possibly a store front to sell some of the items I would make. So, I made a list of the things I would need to accomplish to launch my new venture. Here’s that list, with some of my thoughts, and the issues I encountered, not necessarily in the order they occurred:
- Develop a plan
I sat at my computer for several days watching YouTube videos and looking at woodworking websites, contemplating what I wanted to accomplish, and the look and feel of my online presence. I then wrote out a plan detailing my objectives, project ideas, blog ideas, timelines, budget, and other miscellaneous thoughts and details. I decided to postpone any decisions regarding forming a legal entity such as an LLC, and whether to monetize my platforms until a later time. My primary objective would be to share my passion for woodworking, help educate a new generation of makers, and have some fun while doing so. What’s that old saying, “do what you love, and the money will follow.” I guess time will tell if there is truth to that saying for me.
- Develop a brand name and logo.
I pondered a name and URL for a while and did some research to be certain there wasn’t another similarly named online presence, and finally settled on “The Swenson Woodshop.” I then started sketching ideas for a logo. I looked at other websites seeking inspiration; I didn’t want to copy anyone else’s design, but I did borrow an element here and there, to ultimately come up with a design that is uniquely mine.
The next step was to build my design using an online logo service, so I could download graphic files for YouTube and a website. I searched for a free high-quality image of a hand plane for the logo without success, so I eventually purchased a royalty free image from Shutterstock and edited it to work in my logo. Using a predefined border template provided by an online logo service, I added and formatted my text, pasted in the hand plane graphic, and resized the logo for various applications. A few clicks later, I had the graphics I needed for YouTube, my website, and an order of 50 stickers on the way.
- Get a video camera.
I have an older Nikon D700 DSLR and a good selection of lens for taking still images, but the camera does not shoot video. I also have an older camcorder that records directly to DVD media, but using that recording media with all the retakes I’ll shoot, would be very cumbersome. So again, it was back to my computer to research what equipment other content providers were using. After considering a multitude of options from cell phones to professional equipment, I chose to purchase the new Nikon Z6 Filmmakers Kit.
This kit included almost everything I needed to get started shooting my own independent films; a 4k camera, 70-24 zoom lens, an external recorder, a handheld gimble, an external microphone, and an adapter so I could use all my existing Nikon F mount lens on the new camera. Wow, I felt like a kid in a candy store! But I still had to buy a couple SSD drives and batteries for the external recorder, a memory card for the camera, a tripod, and some miscellaneous hardware for mounting all this equipment on a tripod or gimble.
I eagerly setup my new equipment and shot a few minutes of me talking into the camera. Yikes, is that what I look and sound like on camera? I wrestled with the issue of my on-camera personality, ultimately deciding to heed the advice of just being myself, but to practice modulating my voice. I don’t want to come across as a different person on camera than I am in person in case I ever interact in person with members of my viewing audience.
Finally, just when I was ready to start shooting for real, the brand-new external recorder started acting up and had to be shipped to the manufacture for repair. Three weeks later, I had the recorder back and was ready to start again.
- Setup the shop to support shooting video.
When I made the decision to shoot videos in my shop, I walked out into the shop to determine what backdrop and camera angles were available. I quickly realized my tightly organized workshop was not setup for shooting video.
The backdrop I wanted was the workbench and hand tool cabinet, they had great visual appeal. But I had no camera angle of the workbench and cabinet except from the very end of the bench, and if I placed my camera there, it would block access to the rest of the shop. I needed an open area in the middle of the shop where the camera could be setup perpendicular to the center of the bench and cabinet, and where I could pan 360 degrees to any tool in the shop.
So, I moved a stub wall I had constructed to hold the lathe tool racks, and moved the workbench to make room for the lathe. Then I shifted the tool cabinet to align it with the workbench which required the relocation of several clamp racks. I think you start to get the idea; moving one thing displaced another thing, which displace yet another thing, which required some other things to be moved. What’s that expression “domino effect.” This process alone took over a week, before everything finally had a satisfactory home, or was exiled to the storage shed.
Then there was the issue of lighting. The shop had several older fluorescent light fixtures; however, the arrangement did not adequately balance the illumination throughout the shop, and there was an issue of color temperature. The older lights produced a yellowish light, probably about 3500k, and I wanted a white 5000k color temperature. The solution, buy new 5000k LED fixtures to replace the old fluorescent lights.
With the light balance and color temperature issue resolved, a new lighting problem suddenly popped up. The glass doors on the hand tool cabinet I wanted as my backdrop now had bright reflections of the new LED shop lights. I moved a couple of the fixtures, added some matt black baffles, and installed a backlight in the cabinet. Happily, these changes resolved the issue without any loss of light balance in front of the cabinet.
- Get a computer and video editing software.
I had decided to record my videos in 4k ProRes 30fps, but I also wanted the ability to work with ProRes RAW files when Atomos eventually updates the firmware for my external recorder. While YouTube doesn’t require this level of video resolution / quality, I wanted to have the ability to record and edit ProRes RAW files to help future proof my investment, for a few more years. But everything I read online regarding video editing stressed how CPU / GPU intensive editing 4k video was. I shopped around online looking for a good deal on the computer I thought I needed, but the prices were so damn expensive I finally decided to build it myself. I had never built a computer myself, always opting to buy a commercial unit from Dell or HP, so it was with some trepidation that I ventured forth on a path not previous trod, at least not by me. I did some research on suggested configurations, watched a number of YouTube videos on building a computer, and finally ordered the components online. Over the next week or two, a lot of boxes showed up on my doorstep.
The build went smoothly enough; I followed one of the online tutorials that used many of the same components I had purchased. Once assembled it booted up to the BIOS without issue, and I was able to install Windows 10 from a flash drive. Of course it was going too smoothly.
I started getting error messages while downloading and installing drivers for the various hardware components, that certain drivers were incompatible with the chipset installed. I could not for the life of me figure out what the problem was. In desperation I finally took the computer to my local geek shop. $100 dollars later, it turned out that the build date on the Windows 10 O/S I’d just purchased predated the build date of the BIOS installed on the motherboard. Basically, the BIOS contained updates the operating system was not updated for. Solution; installed a newer build of Windows 10.
I was finally ready, now I just had to subscribed to, and install, Adobe Creative Cloud Premier Pro, and several YouTube tutorials later I was starting to get the hang of editing videos.
- My Computer Build
- Intel i9-9900k 3.6GHz overclock-able to 5.0 GHz
- 64 GB RAM
- 500 GB SSD for operating system and program files
- 1 TB M.2 SSD for video project files in production
- 4 TB 7200 rpm HD for completed project files and media library
Boy is this new computer fast. Now I need to pull the hard drive containing my library of photos of out of my old Windows Vista computer and install it as an additional drive.
- Setup a website
Eventually I turned my attention to setting up the website. How difficult could it be, given all the advertising online about how you can create a wonderful website in a few minutes without any coding experience. What a line of BS that is! The process of registering domain names and setting up the hosting service was simple enough, and installing the WordPress interface was also straight forward. But from that point on, easy was not the operative word.
Yes, you can create a website online without any coding experience using one of the predefined themes if your satisfied with a very simple cookie cutter site. However, you won’t be up and working in just a few minutes; the template theme does install much of the infrastructure for you, but there is a lot of customization you will need to do to make the template yours. The online documentation largely sucks, its written for people who already know what they are doing. Be prepared to spend hours, if not days or weeks, learning how to navigate, customize pages, install plugins, and eventually copy and paste codex from different help pages into the additional CSS interface to tweak the theme. In retrospect I should have started working on this as one of the first steps because it certainly proved to be the most difficult. Yes, I could have hired someone to build a website for me, and paid them $x,000 of dollars to do so, and saved myself a lot of grief, but then where would the fun have been in doing that?
- Setup a YouTube channel
Setting up my YouTube channel was probably one of the easiest things I did. I logged into YouTube using a Goggle account I had previously setup for this venture, created my brand name, verified my account, added a channel icon and cover photo, and I was ready to load my first video.
As simple as all that sounds, it wasn’t without a few difficulties of course. YouTube recommends uploading a cover photo for the channel art at 2560 x 1440 pixels, which is the size needed to look okay on your TV. But for desktop computers, iPads, and phones, YouTube doesn’t rescale the image to fit your device, they apply a very narrow crop. It’s like looking through a mail slot from several feet back to see what’s inside; you only get to see a narrow strip of the image. If you have a logo as part of your channel art, you have to scale and position it to fit within the narrow crop, or anyone using a device smaller than a TV (which is just about everyone now days), won’t see it. I had to adjust my cover photo several times in Photoshop before it worked with the channel art crop.
The next bit of confusion was the “About” section. I read conflicting documentation as to the purpose of this section. Some indicated it was a section to describe who you were, in the same way “About” is used on websites. I looked at a number of other woodworking channels and found several where they did just that. So, I wrote a narrative about myself, and attempted to paste it into the “About” section, without success. I quickly discovered there was a limit to the number of characters you can enter in this section (1,000 max). I did some more digging and finally learned that the “About” is not about me, but is the description that shows up in search engine results for your channel name. It needs to be short and to the point on what your channel has to offer, and should contain key words to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Now why didn’t the YouTube help just say that upfront; why did I have to learn that from a third-party blog article?
I worked my way through these minor issues and was finally ready to upload my first video. Now I was back to Premier Pro and the questions of what render and export settings to use to maximize the quality of my YouTube video. I won’t go into those details here, suffice to say I had to do some more homework to determine the optimal settings. With my first video uploaded, I added a title, a description, and some SEO tags.
A salient point I have discovered since beginning this venture, is that software vendor support is seldom where I find the answers to my issues. It’s the community of users who seem to know more about how to use the product or service, than the people who created the product or service. Or, maybe the vendors just suck at documentation?
- Create some content
It takes time to build up a content library, but I had to have something before I could launch either the website or YouTube channel. I decided to start with the easiest and most obvious content pieces to get my media platforms up and running. My first video would be “The Shop Tour” and my first blog article would be “Getting Started Online.” Both of these seemed straight forward enough; I didn’t need to build a project, I just needed to document the shop I already had, and discuss the process I went through to launch my new venture. With my media platforms up and running, I could then turn my attention to creating new content.
I started thinking about my approach to these projects and outlining the steps from day one. The video would have an introduction, followed by a 360-degree pan, then still image photography of each of the machines or work areas, followed by a closing. Here’s the outline I drafted.
Shop Tour Outline
- Welcome (video) camera center host behind bench audio live
- Logo (logo graphic) fade in, fade out music
- Shop Tour Intro (video) camera center host behind bench audio live
- 360 Degree Tour (video) camera center slow 360 pan voice over
- Left-side Tour (still images) voice over
- Center Tour 1 (still images) voice over
- Right-side Tour (still images) voice over
- Center Tour 2 (still images) voice over
- Summary (video) camera center host behind bench audio live
- Credits TBD
With this outline in hand I started to write the narrative. I have a computer in my shop so working out there, I opened a new Word document, and standing in the position the camera would occupy while shooting the video or still images, I vocalized out loud what I wanted to say about each machine or work area. I would practice the narrative out loud until it sounded right and included the points I wanted to make. Then I typed that narrative in Word exactly as I had practiced it. I repeated this process for each of the machines and work areas to be include in the shop tour, working my way around the shop. I now had a draft narrative that I revised several times as I would read through it, set it aside, come back later and repeat the review.
As I mentioned previously, I initially had problems with the video recording equipment and it had to be repaired. I worked around that issue by first shooting the still images and recording the voice over narrative for those parts of the tour. With the recorder back from the repair shop, I then shot the video for the intro and closing scenes, and added those into the video timeline. That’s part of the Hollywood magic, scenes are rarely if ever shot in the same sequence that they appear in the final film.
When I wasn’t working on the shop tour project, I worked on notes for this blog article, “Getting Started Online.” Again, I drafted an outline, and then wrote notes as I thought of them for the various sections. Eventually, I gathered my notes and sat down at the computer to weave the fragmented thoughts into a narrative. I’ll confess I am not a good writer and I struggled with these narratives for some time before I had something I was willing to publish. Even now if I review what I’ve published I would probably revise it again. Is it too verbose, does it flow with continuity, does it make sense, is it even of interest to anyone? All the self-doubts of a beginning blogger trying to find their voice.
I’m thinking about that next project now that my intro pieces are complete, and my media platforms are ready to launch. I think my initial approach to creating video content will start with a project idea based on some item I actually need for my home or shop, or a task or method of work that will be required to build the project. For example; I need a set of doors for the lower case of the hand tool cabinet. I also need 3 cabinet doors for my master bathroom which I started remodeling about 6 months ago.
Now I have a project – building cabinet doors. The next step is to outline the project, determine which parts will be video with live audio, and which will be still images with voice over. I need to think about the camera angles and focal lengths I’d like to use, check the lighting for the work areas involved, verify I have all the tools, cutters and project materials, write a draft narrative, and do a walk through for the build. I’ll put all this information in a detailed outline and write a draft narrative, which I know will get totally revised once I get in the shop and start production, but I need a road map to start the process, and this is my approach. I think this process in akin to creating a story board and script in the film industry.
So, there you have it, my creative process. It usually starts when I think I’m most creative, early in the morning about 6am, sometimes earlier, sitting in my recliner with a cup of hot coffee, the cable news idiots turned on but tuned out, and a notepad in my lap to jot down thoughts and inspiration for future projects.
- Go live
I pressed the Launch and Publish buttons, and broke out the beer!
So, there you have it, my journey getting started online. I’ve learned a lot in the short time since I started this venture, and its been an exciting period learning new skills. At 64 years young now, I keep reminding myself that “yes you can teach an old dog new tricks.”