Today I'm learning to set myself on fire.
Why am I telling you this? It's part of my scheme to follow the practices outlined in Austin Kleon's book, "Show Your Work." You may have seen social media posts bearing the hashtag #ShowYourWork. Those people are also following Kleon's advice.
The gist? Share snippets of your creative process — explain what you're working on, how you did things, what you plan to do next, discoveries you've made on along the way.
So, why do I want to set myself on fire? It's an experiment. I'm noticing a disturbing pattern in my family background. The Irish and Norwegian ancestors have a close personal relationship with fire, maybe a little too close. To illustrate this, I want to surround myself with flames, safely, in video format. I asked ChatGPT to help me come up with a good title for this, but it said, "I'm sorry. I cannot participate in dangerous activities."
I would tell you some other ridiculous things ChatGPT tells me, but Kleon says to share selectively. Do you have Social Media friends who post every time they eat something, clean something, or go somewhere? Right. That's not selective. We don't want that.
What are Kleon's reasons for all this sharing?
Teaching others reinforces your own knowledge.
It's a great way to connect with your friends, family, or followers.
You might end up helping somebody else. You don't need to be an expert to help others.
These seem like good reasons. I also encourage my team at work to share in a similar fashion. I'm the team manager for a group of software developers, and often when somebody shares a work-in-progress, another person will chime in with new ideas or a solution to a tricky problem.
I am not an advanced video editing wizard, so I had to think about how to surround myself with flames. I had a video of me talking in my office and a video of flames burning on a black background, and I used a feature in my video editor called "background removal." Sometimes this is called a "green screen effect."
Most video and audio editing software will have you arrange things on tracks. If you want to display 2 videos at once, you can stack one above the other on different tracks. You could also stack audio in there as well. That's how you would add music and sound effects. You can think of these tracks as layers. The top track is the top layer.
Lets say I put the burning flames on track one and the video of me on top of that.
At this point, you can't see the flames because the video of me is completely covering them. But if I remove the background in the talking video - just take my office background out of here completely - it will look like there is a fire behind me and beside me. And if I want to look like I'm completely surrounded by flames, I can add a 3rd track with another copy of the flames, and remove the background on it.
Then I'll end up with flames in front of me, and more flames in general.
View the attached video to see the result.
My lunch hour is over. I'm off to a planning meeting, and a deployment meeting, and probably some other meetings. Maybe we'll show our work. Maybe we'll pretend we're on fire. Later this week I’ll release this video. I’ll talk about it more in a couple of days.
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