Working hard or hardly working?

There’s working hard, and then there’s overworking. For some reason every time I approach working hard, I freak out about overworking then fall into an endless cycle of procrastination with hundreds of excuses for why I shouldn’t be working right now.

For example, I got an email on Sunday night that said, “Please bring in all your work tomorrow as you will be assessed and it will be decided whether or not you will be able to continue on the course” I had plans of doing my a lot of homework that sunday evening, but that email managed to change my mind. I thought to myself, what is this? Britain’s next top designer, I pay for this course only to be told that I can’t continue. I put up with excessive amounts of homework, extra school days around my work life and real life, which is currently no existent, and you’re telling me that you’re just going to take my money and send me home?

It’s fair to say I did no work that night, but I also did something else, something much worse to myself. I stayed up all night, I don’t know how I ended up awake at 5am but I did and I definitely hadn’t planned on it. I know that I can’t function without 8 hours sleep but somehow I completely self sabotaged myself and left myself in a very deep hole.

I’m not sure if there’s a moral to be taken from my story, but I know that there may be some great advise in there. Such as, stop freaking out you loon and just get on with it.

The truth about vlogging

So you may or may not know that I’ve recently started a youtube channel. Now it seems to be a pretty easy way to blog, you just sit infront of a camera and talk for a few minutes, right?

Wrong. There is so much more to vlogging than just a bubbly personality and a camera, and here is where I start rambling on about my first vlog.

When I turned on my camera and started filming, I’m sure it took me 3 or 4 takes just to get hello because talking into a camera alone in my room felt so alien and uncomfortable that I just kept laughing and turning it off. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I needed to leave the camera running and just get on with it.

Once I had two successful takes I uploaded my videos onto my computer and it dawned on me. How do I edit this mess? I started having all kinds of flash backs from film and media lessons passed, all done on a mac with iMovie. Great, I’ve got a pc, only made worse with windows 8. Finding editing software that matches your ability when you have 0 ability is not easy. I mean, that was some tough loving. For my first video I used windows movie maker, which you may have gathered is not up to scratch. It took way more work than necessary, Every time you made a cut you had to delete and nothing moved smoothly. Needless to say I was frustrated but I managed it.

The weirdest part was watching it back, especially as I was editing. Natural human behavior is not suitable for film. I move my hands all over the place when I talk and I don’t stop talking to get things I just ramble on as I disappear. Also I tend to look up when I’m talking instead of into the camera which is strange, I’m not really sure why that is.

The worst thing that I did in two videos, is film and finish the whole video and have not filmed anything at all, or had the mic turned off. When you film a video a second time you’ll find that you’ve lost momentum instead of what you’d expect to happen and be really with it because you’ve practiced. No, sir.

In conclusion, I have a lot of work to do, and hopefully I can keep at it. Check out my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafj7r_OIiuqWKo7cTLmwKw and follow my vlogging progress too. Who knows, you might even learn to like me. XD