Cornwall UK, winter 2022.
Blog time : as I write it is late December 2022, in fact it’s just a day before the actual ‘solar’ end of the year – the day when the sun is at it’s lowest and the day the shortest ; this morning at mid-day it’s still almost dark because it’s heavily overcast and the valley is thick with low lying rain clouds. How’s that for the most miserable and uninspiring start to a blog post ?
It’s been blowing hard from the west at about 40 Kn and raining hard for the last 24 hours so I haven’t even been outside the house except to quickly check the covers on the boat and to make sure that the drains are all working – in heavy rain we occasionally have a problem with the surface water here. For once i’m actually quite glad of the rain because it has melted the ice that has made driving up and down the hill a bit challenging and means that I can stop worrying about the house’s mains water supply which froze 3 times in the previous week.
The end of the year and a reflection about the blog.
It’s simply my way that I tend to have a look at my sites statistics and analytics – how many viewers and how many visitors I have had – and then which posts have been popular and which ones have failed to connect with viewers ; also, this year I have a revamped video channel to look at and do the same kind of thing and then compare and contrast my two channels.
What I find is that my main blog, this one, has had a slowly declining number of views since it’s high point in 2019 – which was the year during which I spent 110 days at sea in the little Liberty over in Brittany and then another 30 or so down in the UK’s west country. In 2020 of course we had a lockdown forcibly imposed on us and I resolved to keep my blog going just to give viewers something to chew on and which would maybe take their minds off the sheer state of misery that the same lockdown created. I was a bit surprised when my blog views went sharply down for a while and that was during the peak of the so called pandemic ; this seemed odd because it was thought that many people were turning to the internet for some escape and entertainment.
In both 2021 and 2022 I find that my views and visitor numbers have declined again so I wondered if i’m getting something wrong – or at the very least not providing the kind of content that readers and visitors want. The other side of that is that as well as being content creator i’m also a content consumer and just like many other people my internet usage went up in the last few years and I note that other content creators have been a lot more successful ; the caveat is that the successful ones have been and still are video based.
Another observation is that my blog has been mostly about my backyard boatbuilding project and while super interesting to me I can see why it would be much less so to others – during the build I even started to do a self parody of posts when I was talking about the same details for several weeks of posts as in “what the stringer did next” and “fifty shades of stringer“…….and so on. Sometimes my weekly entertainment was just working on the project, day after day, and trying to think up catchy titles for……what the stringers really did next. Luckily I did eventually get past that stage so you weren’t ever subjected to “the stringer strikes back”, “son of stringer” and ‘stringer – a new hope”.
What I completely failed to do was video the whole thing, I have my reasons – partially that I don’t like the sound of my own voice on video and neither do I like being a ‘talking head’ just talking about what the stringer did this week. My better objection was that I did take hundreds, into thousands, of stills photographs and that my mental effort was almost entirely engaged in actually building the whole thing and just getting it down in print.
At the end of year two of the build though I knew that the winter was going to be a problem for me and that I really needed something to engage my mind with so I resolved then to have a much more serious try at producing quality video content – it’s that that I really want to talk about in this first blog post of 2023.
On You-tube and anti-social media.
I feel that I owe a debt of gratitude to a small number of Youtube video content creators who helped me get through the last two years, in fact I will finish this post with a shortlist of thanks and honorable mentions to those creators. As a small time content creator in both print and now in video I have greater respect for those that can do it well and in fact for most people who even attempt to do it for better or worse : there is a ‘dark side’ of course and for the main part of this post I want to focus on a snarky post that popped on a sailing based Facebook channel.
I feel that this needs responding to so I will post the OP – or original post, in full.
“This may not be a popular opinion: The massive amount of folks making YouTube videos about sailing has made it hard to find any that get to the point and are actually informative. I keep seeing this: I’m a totally new to sailing, please follow my channel as I learn. I guess I’m just an old curmudgeon sailmaker. Put down the camera and sail. “
Here also is the first response and, once again, that Facebook seems to want to keep at the top of that page :
“yes! It’s driving me nuts! 5 years ago it was actually good quality content. Now everyone and their dog is a sailor and videographer with a YouTube channel. Not to mention the guys who are exploiting their wives and girlfriends for views.”
That particular post was live and seemed to stay featured as the lead post on that particular Facebook page for several weeks , as you can see for yourself it’s basically ‘snarky’ and anywhere else it would be dismissed out of hand but I suspect that the Facebook algorythym picked it up and kept promoting it because Facebook is inherently toxic (in my opinion).
So…….what can we make of this ?.
I don’t pretend to be anything but an old sailor, beavering away in my backyard to build a simple boat and then both writing about it and now producing video content about it : i’m not an skilled and experienced boatbuilder, nor am I a slick film-maker and video editor but it’s a boat, it’s free content and I hope that it is informative.
For this post though lets go back to the somewhat snarky Facebook post and pull that apart for a look and a think – starting with the first response to the OP : ” Now everyone and their dog is a sailor and videographer with a YouTube channel. Not to mention the guys who are exploiting their wives and girlfriends for views.“
I actually agree with this and if I have writing time and post space then i’ll tell you a short story about this from my own experience but for now I would just like to say that in my opinion many of the current Youtube sailing couples remind me of a line from David Fletcher’s 1999 film Fight Club where “everything feels like a copy of a copy”. To me nearly every new Youtube sailing channel features a very mediocre boat , a sailing couple as dull as ditchwater and whose whole idea is a poor copy of something like La Vagabonde – once neatly described by film maker Dylan Winter as ‘La Vag’.
There are some good exceptions, of course there are, and I would like to highlight at the top of the list the young Australian couple Troy and Pascale, their old cruising boat Mirrool and their well filmed and informative long voyage around the whole of Australia. They are now ashore and forging a new life as homesteaders so I wish them all success in that. Another channel that comes to mind that also spans the responding poster’s time period is the ‘Sailing Frenchman’ who started off his filming with a small (26 feet) old and knackered cheap cruiser-racer, totally rebuilt it in a forest clearing and then sailed it over the Atlantic : he has since gone on to do a Mini Transat race project, a Clipper race project ……all on film and all very engaging and once again informative.
The ‘first responder’ post is also sadly true in the last part of his comment : “Not to mention the guys who are exploiting their wives and girlfriends for views.“. One channel immediately comes to mind – where their whole raison d’etre is to titillate with low end nudity and then create a video paywall that entirely features soft core nudity. I’m basically cool with nudity and by no means a prude and if it ‘floats your boat’ then fine…….but it’s almost nothing to do with sailing.
Finally, for this section, I would mainly like to respond to that Facebook OP by saying that in my opinion you’re completely wrong and that there are dozens of good channels out there, free content to and all done in their own time ofren just for the fun of doing it. My final point would be something like ‘ok, if you really can’t find a single positive thing to say about a single (free) Youtube channel then maybe you should amaze and stun us all with one of your own.
In this simple sailors words – ‘put up or shut up”
On a more positive note I would like to suggest that the most interesting and informative sailing video content isn’t coming from the standard cruising yacht scene and I happen to think that is because the yachts are intrinsically standardized modern industrial ‘product’ and their owners much the same. The interesting stuff and most creative, in my opinion, all comes from the dinghy/small boat scene and mostly from owner/builders who have built and/or modified their own small craft ; just two examples that immediately come to mind are channels like ‘Arwen’s Meanderings’ – that’s local boy Steve Parke and his home built Navigator and then Roger Barnes and his bare bones lugger ‘Avel Dro’. Some of Roger’s recent video’s – his tour of the Arcachon basin and the Venice lagoon have been more like short sailing films…..well done too.
So – where am I going with this ?
At the end of my 2022 boatbuilding season I challenged myself to have a much more serious try at making short video’s so in November and December I started on ten new video projects as self determined learning exercises ; my basic aim was to get maybe five or six completed video’s of about ten minutes duration. At the same time I went through my older video’s and seeing how embarrassingly bad they are I culled all but one of them…..clean slate and all that.
The second thing I did was to take a second and even third look at many of the video’s that iv’e enjoyed in the past ,only half of them are sailing based the rest being things like ‘maker’ channels and bushcraft : for each channel I made a few notes about what features I liked, what worked for me and equally what didn’t and in a way I tried to see what techniques the videographer was using and which I might be able to use myself. I’m very conscious of the fact that it would be a really bad idea to copy anyone else’s work or even their style because , as I said above, most of the channels I immediately reject I do so because they seem to be just a poor copy of a not very interesting original.
I said earlier that I would give you a list of honorable mentions of channels that helped me get through the flat days of lockdown when I was done with boatbuilding and blogging for the day : rather neatly these are also many of the video’s I watched to try and pick up tips on style and technique so here goes. Obviously these are personal choices except in my case what iv’e done here today is transfer a few of my notes about what I thought worked .
Sailing channels. As I said above, two channels immediately came to mind so here is a link to one of Roger Barnes’s recent mini-films and one to Steve Parke’s channel (Arwen).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdABAdG9KHo&t=956s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbzt1EMiJ_E
I’m lucky in that I know Steve Parke so I asked him about his filming and editing, both of which I was failing at, and importantly for me what he thought the purpose of his channel is. Now, one thing we talked about was cameras because while I can and do film at home with a bulky, expensive and fragile DSLR I don’t intend to take that one to sea with me in an open boat. I don’t know Roger to speak to so what I did was take a careful look at where he is mounting cameras, what he is filming and how and then with both channels how many separate clips they use to stitch together to make a story.
The important thing though is that i’m not Steve and neither am I Roger but one thing Steve and I agreed on was that we can only be ourselves and only tell our own stories – the crucial thing being to have a story to tell and something to share with others. Both Steve and Roger clearly do have a story to tell, they are both a bit unique and quirky, which I like and of course they are both working with boats and locations that are similar to my own boat and to the places that I will also sail.
The videographer that inspired me to get a boat again after a long break doing other things was film-maker Dylan Winter who made an entire series of video’s about sailing a small boat around the UK and going in and out of the many small harbors, rivers and creeks that I have started to enjoy in the last few years. Dylan seems to have mostly disappeared from view although that might just be a problem of not having visited his channel for a while. Dylan clearly was a professional film maker and it’s an important note that he clearly likes being out on the water, in nature and enjoying his time with the wildlife and the quiet anchorages.
What that reminds me of is why iv’e just taken 2 years to build a small boat and why I like to (need to) escape to the quiet places – i’m a natural introvert and according to one well known psychologist we introverts find great peace and solace in the outdoors : I see that also in Dylan’s work. Dylan I feel is both creative, a bit of an introvert and quite a bit of a grump – which sounds a lot like me !. I think what I also first learnt from Dylan is that that sailing has a natural video pace that is quite slow rather than being a modern ‘crash-bang’ quick scene cut video with a punk music background……I’ll come back to that later on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVRdf0seHxY&list=PL-leOGnyCr2T4sqsNeteZOFVt2zppaRl9&index=4
Speaking about the outdoors but going sideways a little , one of my favorite Youtube channels has very little to do with sailing except that the bloke who runs it has built and does sail an open canoe although mostly what he does is best known as bushcraft. This channel – ‘Simon – a bloke in the woods’ is perhaps my best model for how to film edit and produce sailing video’s later on in my journey with the medium ; the two things I really noticed about Simon’s work is how he does a kind of lead-in or introductory story right at the start and without having to say anything – it’s all done with the action and the music and only then do we get the friendly greeting. The second thing I take from his work is how he builds a scene or story and how long or short individual clips have to be for us to ‘read the visual story’ , as I said above sailing has a naturally slow pace most of the time as does bushcraft so while not needing or wanting to copy Simon’s work I begin to understand his technique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK742DZEn6s&t=1612s
Maker channels.
Most of the Youtube channels above with the exception of Simon who has built his own cedar strip canoe and his own baker tent are, in a way, video’s about the ‘cherry on the icing of the cake’ – and what I mean by that is that the video’s are a kind of end product of all of the hard work of building or fitting out a boat, getting it to the water, making voyages and then finding the time and effort to film some of it and edit it.
Most of that doesn’t relate much to what I am doing right now and the ten video projects that I worked on just so that I could get more comfortable with occasionally having to be in front of the camera while I make or explain stuff – I don’t like either my voice or my appearance on camera and did think for a while about working in such a way that I don’t need to be on camera at all. It is mainly what Dylan does for example but neither Roger or Steve take that approach in sailing and Simon always comes across well whatever he is doing – he’s a natural perhaps where I am not.
Anyway…..what I am trying to do right now has a lot less to do with showing off ‘the nature’ of out coastline, rivers and creeks and far more to do with being in the workshop simply making stuff or taking about making stuff ; I have felt for a while that I need two different video styles to capture both aspects so I also spent some time watching and enjoying the various ‘maker’ channels.
I suspect, in fact I hope, that many of my visitors will also be followers of at least one maker channel – for the few that aren’t already fans and maybe aren’t familiar with the term then maker just refers to someone who makes stuff – and it can be anything you like. I occasionally dip into Bernadette Banner’s channel even though it’s highly unlikely that I will ever get around to making an Edwardian walking skirt but it is simply that creativity is creativity whatever thing is being created. For the visitors who already know their makers well then you will know that the godfather of maker channels is most likely Jimmy Diresta who can and does make just about everything except Edwardian walking skirts !.
Jimmy Diresta also has a unique video style – not so much in this one but he often works through a project from beginning to end just with film – it is mainly from Jimmy that I picked up the technique of accelerating the video speed of anything that would otherwise be too visually slow to flow nicely during a ‘maker’ clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqAaAWTmF_M
If Jimmy Diresta is the Godfather of makers then Englishman Colin Furze is the crazed English punk version complete with 100 Mph dodgem car, multi-thousand firework rocket send-offs and all kept just this side of workshop suicide with his health and safety tie…….there’s no way that I can match this guy’s ebullient enthusiasm but when I need an anti Covid cheer up he is the man to provide it. Turbo/pulse jet powered scooter anyone ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83jH0sVCM9Q
So……what did you do during the Covid war ?
Me…..I built a boat, wrote about it and photographed it, some days I went out walking and most days I spent far too long on the internet – my excuse is that it was all research towards this year’s video project.
Now, I did say that I would dish out a few honorable mentions to people and channels who helped me stay moderately sane ; well, most of them I have already mentioned although I do now know a lot more about Renaissance and Baroque art thanks to an art critic called Waldemar Januschak.
My main memory of the Covid lockdown, which we now know was pointless and harmful is the huge amount of media fear mongering and profit generated push to vaccination – now also seen as harmful and clinically dangerous – and like it seems only a small handful of people I hankered for facts and truth. One of the few channels to do that was a fellow Nurse and medical educator (Dr) John Cambell ; if you’re wondering then he is my top honorable mention from the whole period because he seemed to be one of the few to keep a clear head, didn’t swallow the media (and social media) BS but instead imparted actual information by going through the data line by line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDCOMD13Usc
After all that…….
The simpler and shorter version is that i’m going to have a better try at producing boat based video clips, iv’e been watching a few other channels to get some ideas, am embarrassed by how poor most of my own content is so far and therefore I am resolved to do much better in 2023.
Best wishes Y’awl.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 