creating a/broad, July 13, 2013

YouTube and the Technophobe
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

When I create a new work or start a new tour, it is not one thing that I am working on, not one piece that I am creating. Inevitably a new leg on the tour calls up THIRTY new things on the to-do list, many of which end up being their own mini-creations. Right now, as I look ahead to the Edinburgh Fringe, my newest creative project is… YouTube videos.

Originally I wasn’t into it. I mean, I have known about YouTube for years, and followed along while other artists—mostly comedians—posted their own videos. I saw the merit in it, especially for performers, but I just was having a hard time wrapping my own mind around it as being a worthy application for me to get into. What would I say? What would I do? And would anyone even watch it? It was a complicated mix of writer’s block and performance anxiety, with a dash of technophobia.

The person videotaping it accidentally covered the microphone with her finger while holding my camera

Finally this year, my dear Fringe friend Rosie Bitts spoke up, told me to do it, and, when I protested that I didn’t know what to actually do, she came at me with four episode ideas all at once, like she had just been keeping them in her purse waiting for me to suck it up and ask for her help, finally. That gave me the motivation to sit down in the Ottawa Beer Tent one not-rainy afternoon (they’re rarer than you might think or like during June in Ottawa) and brainstorm a bunch more ideas, with the help of another Fringer. I found someone to edit videos for me, at least until the second week of August, and I set up a production schedule, and… I just got started.

The first one, a DIY tutorial on how to laminate a poster with packing tape, went up a week ago. The person videotaping it accidentally covered the microphone with her finger while holding my camera, so the sound quality is terrible. (Before that I didn’t even know where the mic was, so… live and learn!) I may re-shoot later, but I just wanted to get something up, overcome my inertia around this.

The second one went up yesterday. It’s “backdoor access” footage (heh heh, I said backdoor access) of the warm-up dance I do to David Bowie’s “Fame” before slut (r)evolution. Totally in-and-out-of-focus, grainy and all, because my technician in Ottawa wanted to give me faux disco lighting during that little warm-up.

What situations are funny that I haven’t yet had a chance to explore in one of my shows?

These first two vids, oof, they are rough, so rough that I had to put disclaimers about the production quality in the video description. I may re-shoot them. But at least THEY’RE UP. I had to pound through the psychological blockage somehow, And I’m learning, or at least I’m trying to learn. This is creative artist mind mixed in with tech mind with project coordinator plus producer/promoter mind. This is the good, multi-layered type of thing that I enjoy and want more of, and probably will get more of as I put an increasing number of eggs into this one particular basket.

Working with these video has gotten me thinking: what areas of know-how do I have that people might want? What situations are funny that I haven’t yet had a chance to explore in one of my shows? The people who follow me, whether they consider themselves friends or enthusiastic fans, what more do they want to know about my touring experiences, or my phone work, or my personal life, that they aren’t getting through Facebook or Twitter? Who do I meet, where do I go, that I want to share with other people in my life because I think they’re that awesome? It tends to pull me out of the solely creative space and into a service space. What can I make or do for you?

This is NOT a question that I ask myself while working on my performance projects for stage, not consciously and certainly not up front. If I were to start thinking about what the audience wants, before or during the writing of my shows… GAH. I mentally stutter just thinking about it. That is too much input, that is not of the essence, in fact, that is the magic of live theatre, and the scary part too: we don’t know exactly what audiences are going to take away. Only later, after the shows debut, after we’ve been touring them a while, do we begin to understand what our art does for them. It’s a sizzling, live connection that happens in a show and we have only partial control over what flows through it.

These are still creative projects; marketing and outreach, these are not any less creative than a 60-minute script.

Youtube videos, though… and Facebook posts and blog posts and special-event promo gimmicks and carefully composed tweets and clever photo campaigns… these are the ones where I do ask for input, where I do really want to know what people want to see, where I test things out to see what they respond to, what stirs them to take action, what really make them happy. These are still creative projects; marketing and outreach, these are not any less creative than a 60-minute script. They’re just creative in a different way.

I think that’s why I like them so much, why I can spend hours fretting over the exact excerpt for a fringe preview night, or get so amped up about street promo projects, or just obsess about whether I should get a sign professionally done for my Sidewalk Smut stand or no (I have conclusively come down on NO for that one). This weird interplay between who I am and what I offer and what people really really want and what they’re used to getting… this is thinky and complicated and sexy and multilayered and FUN.

On to the next video post.

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Cameryn's Moore's piece, slut (r)evolution, is playing, currently, at Montreal's Zoofest