And with the passage of Thanksgiving, it officially 'tis the season for all discussions of past present and future to be delivered exclusively by a trio of ghosts who resemble people in my life.
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| And in walked the ghost of PhoenixWings Past |
It's also time for me to admit that I secretly had no earthly idea what kind of tone to pursue. I'm pretty sure there was a desire to be fun and witty, mixing in with my tendency to be a straight man comedian, hampered by the need to babysit the kind of boring, soulless stuff I regularly churned out in school alongside this kind of stuff. The result is something, admittedly, even I didn't really enjoy reading.
I honestly can't tell you if it's just because I'm a creative type who naturally hates all his older work or if it's a case of the stuff I wrote genuinely being really uninteresting. If I was a reasonable outside observer, I would probably come to the conclusion that it was likely a combination of the two, but I'm an emotionally invested nutter, so I'm going to say it's all my fault regardless.
A lot has changed for me since I started this kind of work. I've started university work, which wasn't nearly as much fun as everyone said it would be. I started listening to comedy podcasts in lieu of cable, which I no longer have, and the radio, which has been playing the "Wildest Dreams" so often for the last two months that I've seriously contemplated shiving my radio with a hunting knife. And I spend a lot more time with Wings now.
As circumstances and stimuli have changed, I've changed. Maybe to a significant enough degree that we can call this a regeneration, but maybe not. I'm not totally sure just yet. I'm sure I will be two regenerations down the line with the benefit of hindsight, but for now, meh.
Speaking of wavering tone, let's talk art styles! Specifically, the art style of the YouTube videos on my channel. I've tried creating simpler, easier to manipulate versions in Illustrator, but I'm not really a huge fan of the shape this creations take on. In one video, I experimented with a hand drawn, hand colored look, and while this experiment did lead to me adopting a background I was much happier with, I was pretty disappointed with the overall look in that video. I've also tried a combination, hand drawn and hand colored. It saves me a bit of time in the drawing phase, but not as much as Illustrator does.
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| Followed by the ghost of PhoenixWings present. (It has no face because I don't have three friends) |
After all the mess that is the past, I've finally settled into a kind of groove. I know what I want to do, which I can say is pretty exciting in its own, completely monotonous way. As of right now, the most popular articles on this blog are easily Crackpot Theories (Sharknado Nazis and Squirrel Surveys, as some of you may recall), so obviously I intend to continue with more of those. The recent article on Squirrel Surveys is actually also a landmark as the first piece I ever tweeted about, but that's probably best left to another paragraph.
Nerdgasm articles, while not as popular, revolve around a subject matter that I have a lot of passion for, (And also some expertise maybe?) so they're not going anywhere anytime soon either. If anything, I'm probably going to start making more of those just to give myself something to do with my life once I inevitably run out of shows to binge watch. *again raises shield to deflect sea of recommendations*
The Lazy Sunday Post, then, shall remain as the new be all end all, in that it will be where all articles that don't fall under the two other tags go to die. I mean- well, no, I mean die. I didn't mistype. Nobody loves the Lazy Sunday Post. Not even me, and I write the damn things.
I mentioned Twitter earlier and now I'm going to mention it again: I have a Twitter. I got one mostly to reserve my name on it, but also because I knew that in theory it could in some way be useful. To date I've tweeted the releases of two pieces of content, a blog article and a YouTube video, with mixed results. The blog article saw record views, while the YouTube video, my longest to date, ...didn't. Didn't is the most gentle way to describe that. So I'm not really sure what allowed the article to get a boost but not the video. Maybe it was because the article tweet had a bizarre picture, maybe people just don't click strange links on Twitter. Who knows. Hopefully me, at some point.
But what about the video half of my internet... career? Can we call it a career? I'm not sure I want to, because then I think the government can start collecting taxes, and at this point, they'll just end up taking my desk.
Anyway, much like the Desk of 003 blog, my YouTube channel was started as this very nebulous thing that I could do stuff in. Which, while flexible, isn't the sort of thing most people are looking for in a channel. At least, it's not what I'd look for in a channel. I'm interested in subscribing to channels that regularly produce a specific niche of content, and I imagine that's the case with most other people. It's why some YouTubers actually create multiple channels, so that new content doesn't clash with the existing identity of a channel.
I'm happy to announce that much like the blog, I've reigned in the PhoenixAgent003 YouTube channel to a much more focused content stream, breaking it up into two distinct parts: PhoenixWings Shorts, and a headline series.
PhoenixWings Shorts will be quick, one to two minute videos that amount to a single joke or some kind of short video project that I manage to put a PhoenixWings spin on, and they'll essentially be about whatever. Two of them out now are pure, unabashed metahumor revolving around show art style and my Photoshop ineptitude. At this point in time, I have no plans to monetize any of these shorts, so as far as my control extends, there will be no ads on these videos.
The headline series will be an ongoing series I contribute to with as much frequency as I can handle. They'll be longer videos, closer to the four to six minute range. Currently, the headlining series is The PhoenixWings Guide to Heroics of the Super Variety, a show where each episode will give you a quick schooling on how to be a superhero. In the works are episodes to discuss secret identities, costume design, threat detection, and many more topics that I was too lazy to type out for fear of creating a run on sentence. Because I would love to put a roof over my head doing this, I will be monetizing these videos in some capacity or other.
While I'm on the subject of videos, I'll briefly touch again on the subject of art style that I mentioned in a past paragraph. After some internal deliberation, I've decided, for now, to go with the hand drawn, digitally colored look, which takes a bit longer to make, but looks way better in my opinion. If you'd like to read this paragraph the way it sounded in my head, click here.
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| And in walked the future. |
The biggest goal, something I suspect to be an ongoing one, is to grow an audience. Currently, I believe I'm on the equivalent of a first name basis with all seven of my YouTube subscribers, and I can only assume the readership of a vast majority of my blog readership remains me, Wings, and my mother acting in secret. I'm not reaching anyone I couldn't reach by walking down the hall or dial a number in my phone, and I'd definitely like to change that moving forward. By that I mean reach more people, not less. Just to clarify.
Beyond that, things get much more specific.
First on the agenda, I want to start producing the headlining series faster. I know if I worked it, I could get a video out every two weeks easily, maybe even every week. Bottom line though, however it works out, I want my content to start coming out on a regular, predictable basis, or as close to it as I can get it.
Obviously, I expect The PhoenixWings Guide to Heroics of the Super Variety (or TPWGtHotSV
for all you acronym enthusiasts) to run for a while, but eventually a new headliner will need to step up. I'm thinking of doing a follow-up series where I do a cartoonish evil voice and tackle a whole set of issues for supervillains. I'll call in Xineohp's Guide to Evil Nerfairianism, and I'm actually really looking forward to doing some of those. I may even just alternate between TPWGtHotSV and XGtEN just to help keep my brain fresh.
I'd like to start another video series, a monthly one that just sort of serves as a quick update to comic canon for everyone who doesn't have the time to read comics but also doesn't want to feel outgunnned by that one comic book obsessed friend who spoils all the Marvel movies for them. Catching up without catching up, so to speak. I could easily write off like twenty bucks worth of comics on my tax forms if I started this series. I haven't decided what to call it yet, because "This Month in Comics" was taken. Unlike "I am Machingunsaur", which as we previously established, was all me.
I'm currently in the very nebulous stage of starting a podcast to go along with the blog and YouTube channel. Much like the blog and channel before it, it has yet to find any kind of focus or theme as of yet, but I'm hoping to do something in the way of ridiculous hypotheticals (Which according to spellcheck, isn't a word, but screw yourself spellcheck, I make the rules here!).
I've even kicked around the idea of doing some live action stuff. Getting a real desk, a white jacket, a REALLY big piece of lined paper, and just give it a red hot go. Mostly as a one off thing, just to give it a whirl? I really prefer drawing, and I like the more opportunities it affords for subtle visual humor.
Much like my YouTube videos, I'd like to focus on getting content out more regularly on the Desk of 003 blog, and maybe even giving the thing its own proper website at some point down the line. Blog articles don't take nearly as long to produce as videos, and they'd probably serve as nice breaks from all the drawing that goes into videos (even though the articles now also rely on drawings).
At some point, likely much further down the line, I would like to go ad-free on my YouTube videos, and the best way I can think to do that that allows me to retain the total, no strings attached creative independence I currently enjoy would be to adopt a crowd funding model. So at some point in the future, when I actually have an audience, I'll probably launch that.
Speaking of money, I also want to experiment with merchandise, once I figure out how all that shenanigans works. You know, find a way to mass produce products to sell, find a way to sell them, find a way to make that legal, all that jazz. Currently, there aren't any particularly popular or even recurring images in the show outside of mine and Wings' avatars, so I'll probably start by making replicas of the shirts our avatars wear.
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