So there was a period two months ago, where the parkour industry was fairly quiet. Parkour seems to be fairly seasonal in respect to the interest shown by commercial prospects, with the winter months easily feeling slower and more suited for a time to build upon infrastructure and learn, before resuming the workloads in the summer. In this respect, I have found myself with two weeks of back to back projects, youtube collaborations, a clothing promo, a corporate video and a series of short videos for the Beyond the Brink tour project; along with numerous trips to London for interviews, a photoshoot and planning at Ealing Studios. In this respect, virtually all of my efforts have been focuses on the ground, with little time to write blog posts or properly engage with people online.
To address a longstanding issue of a certain ‘Progression 5’ I will be filming and releasing it at some point, I have a song and I have been slowly collecting footage here and there towards it, but the parkour video game has changed. Everyone is producing such stellar content I am in two minds about releasing just ‘another’ parkour video wherein movements are set to music. Instead, I’m in a mind to move my personal channel towards a more community focused end, whilst I will still produce videos for the love of them, I also plan to create an audio podcast, in which I can talk about whatever may be going on. This idea has already been done, but I am no Vlogger. I will execute this Idea in a hopefully much more successful manner and I hope it will be well received!
Secondly, I have concerns about the quality of my channel. Its gotten to the stage now where my average viewcount for a video is over 100k, and its almost dwarfing how I feel about my own work. To this end, I specifically did not put the Ampisound Showreel on to the main Traceurelements channel, for fear of it almost disappointing my subscribers. The number of people that have opted to follow my work is startling and for whatever reason they chose to follow me, it is beginning to concern me that I will end up disappointing them as its simply impossible to balance community based projects with commercial projects at this time, I truly dont have the resources to shoot and edit for myself while all these other projects are on the go. To this end, I will do my best to manage the new podcast project soon, the turnaround is smaller than a full fledged video, and I think the content will be similarly as interesting. I will also plan to begin making smaller, artier videos at a rate of atleast one a month, to test and develop my own editing and filming styles. The progression videos were originally intended for that, but as they rapidly took off and got higher and higher viewing numbers, I stopped wanting to experiment, especially after ‘Dreams’ so I stepped back from that series and instead filmed some other ideas.
Progression 5 will happen, but afterward I hope to let the series rest and work on smaller more bitesize ideas which I can use to further my own style again.
