Welcome all. This blog is a continuation of my “Year 1” blog series. In this series I cover the behind the scenes process of making my content for the first year. In case you missed any of the blogs:
This blog will cover the last family of content I started producing this year. It’s called “Moment of My Time”. Let’s get started.
Frames, Seconds, Minutes
The development of this series was a bit more convoluted than my other stuff. I knew I wanted a third class of content to produce, but I didn’t have much else to go on. I started working on the idea way back in the spring. Unlike the storytime shorts, or meme stuff I didn’t have much to go off of in the development of this series. That said, I did have some ground rules:
I wanted a family of content that could scale from 5 seconds to a few minutes. Versatility in timescale was massively important because I realized how seemingly random the performance was with my content due to length. On top of that, I also wanted a platform where I could make longer Youtube videos.
This content needed to be in the ‘universe’ as my storytime content. I have a fear that my meme content would be received better than my personal content, so I wanted to insure that people were coming to my pages for me, and not specifically for the memes.
I also wanted to re-use the same assets and resources from my storytime shorts to produce content quickly. The idea of having two series that shared production assets from two different production levels was very appealing to me. Think of it like how Apple’s lineup of tech all intermingles with each other now. I wanted that level of productivity for my content. Creating a whole separate class of content in a different style would make production far more time consuming, and make me less able to deliver consistently.
Lastly, I wanted a differentiation between the type of content I would make. I had a platform for telling my personal stories. I had a platform for using popular videos as reference. I wanted a platform where I could make my own original skits and jokes. Due to it being part of my storytime ‘universe’, I could also use some life experiences as reference if they couldn’t work as stories.
‘Moment of My Time” took a lot longer to develop than the other formats and it went through a few iterations (I won’t say what here because I do plan on using those ideas later on). As stated previously, I started developing the idea back in the spring. I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted until the end of August, after I finished making my Toonboom puppets. During the process of making those puppets I started asking myself if I wanted to make my next class of content in black and white or color. It was only because I developed the puppets in Toonboom did I realize that I should expand into color, and it payed off. One of the reasons I was hesitant on color before was because it takes a lot of time to work around color. I also wasn’t sure how it’d look side by side to my other catalogue of shorts, but I’m glad I made that bet.
Once the puppets were finished and I began producing the first shorts for “Moment of My Time”. Once I finished the first one and saw what the final expression would look like, I was happy. It came out better than I expected. I was able to mix the best elements of my storytime content along with the best elements of my meme content. That makes a potent combo! When I released the first short back in November, I was scared because it fell on the shorter side, and it was a new format. That fear was misplaced, as the first short did really well across all platforms, and the second short (which premiered in December), at the time of this writing is my most viewed short on Youtube.
Stop The Clock
A couple of these shorts have premiered so far, and they both did very well. In 2023 I plan to focus more on this format. I think it strikes a great balance and there’s so much potential for making interesting media with it.
Lastly the use of “time” came about organically. When I was developing the idea it was called “I Need A Moment”, but that didn’t have the charm I was looking for. “Moment of My Time” sounded more catchy to me, and when I said it out loud I realized “Oh that’s a good way to let people know this is related to my storytime shorts”. This made me want to try to classify content that has roots in my personal life, imagination, thoughts, etc under the “time” moniker.
Just something to look forward to.
That’s all for my “Year 1” blogs. I hope you enjoyed reading them. Next year is going to be all about content, and making the best shorts that I can possibly make. Please set aside some time in your life to watch them!
-Until next time-
Kyle