At the start of June, I was challenged to make one video a week for eight weeks. This would mean that I would be constantly producing content over June and July, and it was one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever given myself from a Youtube standpoint. Its not August, and I actually managed to successfully complete my challenge, so I wanted to get down some thoughts about the process and talk about a few of the videos as a result.
The first video I released for the challenge, was ‘Inspire’. This was a road-trip I took along with some close friends, from the UK down to Pescara in Italy. It was during this road-trip that the idea for the challenge really came into my mind, and I crunched after returning to the UK to make ‘Inspire’ the first video of the challenge. For me personally, it’s probably the video from the Summer Challenge I still like to watch most. I think that having so many memories and beautiful locations in the one video really gives it a special quality.
‘For the Love of Movement’ was the third video I released. I was kindly invited over to Rotterdam for the event and produced a video as a result. In a lot of ways, I see this video as a counterpart to my 2011 video ‘Move (Literally Dancing)‘ where I film a jam video while also getting the experience of the jam itself.
We then found an accidental viral on our hands. The very talented James Kingston had planned on making a video for Ampisound for some time now, and it was the perfect opportunity to release it during the challenge. Unexpectedly, the video took off and saw an incredible amount of media coverage, resulting in over 1.6million views at the time of writing. Due to the incredible success of the video, both the Ampisound youtube channel and James own personal channel has experienced quite significant growth. James is working on more POV videos and I also have a few interesting new ideas up my sleeve that I’m working on!
As part of my challenge, I’d been digging through tons and tons of footage. Some of this I’d been collecting into my archive series, with scrap clips and bails to all be put in together. 4RCHIVE was so much fun for me to edit, because I genuinely got to relive so many projects from so long ago. Its got unused clips from ‘Constant Motion’ ‘Assumptions’ and ‘Professor Longhair’! It made me so happy to get something so lighthearted and honest up on my channel like that.
The last video I want to talk about, is ‘One Last Time’. As if making weekly videos wasn’t enough of a challenge, I doubled down and decided to make a whole video in a singular day. It was pretty hard! We started filming at 1PM and the video was online by 10.30PM that night! This video was a really good learning experience though, because it really showed that with the right team we can produce quality work with an incredibly fast turnaround time if required. I wouldn’t say I’d want to do this again, but its absolutely a great exercise to see what your limitations are.
All in all, I think the summer challenge video was a great experience for me. My productivity has been exceptionally high as a result of constantly being in production, and I also managed to move infront of the camera to a certian degree. Going forward, I hope to be able to make a video a week, with a vlog type video one week then a proper parkour film the next, but for the immediate future, I think Im going to take my time with my next video!
