Occasionally I get requests from viewers who want to know more about what's behind BuildAModule. How does it work, what tools do I use, how does it work as a business model. These kinds of concepts are hard to convey with a screencast, so I put together a hodge-podge teleprompter and a studio in a closet to record this, one of my first ever live videos, asking you if you'd like to see more of this kind of thing.
Transcript
Hey, so this is kind of video of new for me and it's a bit of an experiment. For the last 5 years I've been making videos on BuildAModule and I've purposefully kept my face out of the picture. A couple years ago I even stopped mentioning my name in the videos.
To me, it makes sense to create the quickest way forward when it comes to learning, and that means taking out everything that's not necessary. So, I got rid of pre-rolls, eliminated pauses, and took myself out. This has also given me the freedom to record videos without a script, because it's a whole lot easier to edit audio in a way that sounds natural than it is to cut up video.
Instead of writing everything out, I instead just see what my brain comes up with. Sometimes it's pretty good, but a lot of the time I have to record a bunch of takes just to get the words to fit together in a way that carries when I'm trying to say. Recording this, where you actually see the words coming out of my face, that's trickier to do on the fly.
I'm sure there's people out there with the skill to ad lib but stay true to whatever they're trying to communicate, but I don't have that skill, at least not yet. So, this is a script. I learned about how teleprompter work and set up a pretty ghetto version of one in a closet that used to be a dark room.
I'm not sure if I have faith that this will turn out that great, because it feels like the most important thing when sharing information or telling a story live like this is being authentic. Conveying the meaning of the words you say with the expressions you make. But, distractions like weird backgrounds or awkward edits can get in the way, even if you're just being yourself.
I think what I try to do with BuildAModule is be a conduit of skill. I try to figure out how to do things, and then see what I can do to make it faster for other people to learn those things. What I'm doing right now, with this video, is sort of something else.
Because instead of a skill or information, I'm trying to convey something that's a bit more behind the scenes. It's more meta. It's more observation and commentary than it is technical.
And, frankly, this is probably way less interesting to those people that are here on the site to learn technical stuff. The thing is that no matter how much a product or work of artistic expression stands on its own, there's always people behind it. Weird, flawed, maybe interesting people who get up every day and do a lot of normal stuff.
For me, as I was learning about business and building web d ...
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