One does not simply finish a script
What do we do when we have writer's block?
That's right: we build a teleprompter app to display that unfinished script we promise we'll get back to just as soon as we're done shaving all these damn yaks.
I thought this little exercise in procrastination might double as a beginner-friendly introduction to a practical creative coding project, so I made a video about the first stage of development. This is my first attempt at a programming tutorial, and it was a bit tricky to find a balance of giving plenty of context for what I was doing, without spending ages explaining the nuts and bolts of programming fundamentals, so I'd love to hear any constructive feedback about how the information is presented, wherever you happen to fall on the novice-l33t spectrum.
I once again had way too much fun making a thumbnail.
In this journey I've been on of documenting some of the creative fuckery I get up to, I've been trying to set myself little... I dunno, stretch goals? extra credit challenges? Like little technical meta stuff above and beyond the project that's the subject of the video, exploring aspects of the craft of making the videos themselves. Sometimes it's showy stuff like stop-motion, or experimenting with lighting, or building an extremely stupid rig. Some of it is subtler, like confronting my fear of manual camera settings, slightly improving my workflow, or making the leap to a fancy Grown Up editing software.
Sometimes the challenge is all mental. For example, it feels weird to publish images of myself where I haven't made an effort to look "camera ready", whatever that may mean in context, and I wanted to intentionally confront that feeling here.
I also almost trashed this video, despite putting a lot of time and effort into it, because I realized at the eleventh hour that I couldn't make everything perfect. There was a feature I'd wanted to add to the project–one that, mind you, I hadn't even mentioned in the video–that I realized might be impossible due to lack of mobile browser support. For some reason, when I discovered this right at bedtime, it genuinely seemed like the entire project was pointless without this feature; I felt like I had wasted a ton of time with little to show for it, and I felt like a fool for not having tested such seemingly load-bearing functionality earlier. Friends, I sobbed.
You know what? It's fine. It's a missing nice-to-have on a low stakes personal project that's going to irritate me forever but it doesn't actually break anything and its absence doesn't negate the other stuff I was trying to accomplish. But of course this little meltdown wasn't really about the missing feature; it was about feeling like that failure confirms my suspicion that I'm a fraud who has no business doing... any of it.
The perennial extra credit bonus challenge with this and basically every other thing I've made for public consumption is convincing myself it's worth doing even if it's not "perfect". That I'm worthy of doing things even if they're not perfect. Even if I'm not "camera ready".
Do you think this might have anything to do with my writer's block? 🤔
Until next time,
xoxo Sparks