When I was in elementary school, I would make little movies with my sister. They were pretty basic. I didn't have editing equipment of any kind, so I'd shoot in sequence. If the first shot was a medium-wide shot, I'd record that. If the next one was a closeup, I'd move the camera up close and record that. And then if I had to have a medium-wide shot again, I'd move back to where I was before and record that. And if my sister or I messed up for any reason, it'd just have to stay in the sequence; there was no easy way of erasing mistakes.
After we were done with the movies, we'd show them to our parents. Sometimes friends or family would happen to be over; we'd show the movies to them, too. Each short film had an audience of two at the least and eight at the very most.
If broadband internet access was more widespread – and if there was a cheap-to-free video uploading service around – we probably would have uploaded our movies to the internet. But doing something like that with the technology available when I was in third and fourth grade was unimaginable. So we were perfectly fine with showing our videos to a small group of people. Like so many creators say, it wasn't for our audience; it was for ourselves.
And then broadband picked up. YouTube came into existence. I started to get this notion that if you made something, you had to share it with other people. After all, doing it was super easy. So, to me at least, uploading videos to the internet became a given instead of an option.
The problem I've had with this mentality, though, is that it results in me putting a lot of pressure on myself. I'm hesitant to upload anything that isn't good. It isn't so much a fear of riddicule that propels that (though I'm sure it's a part of my reason) – it's more of a fear of wasting someone's time. Even if it's just a couple of minutes of their time.
And so this fear creeps into me whenever I start on some project. And then I freak out. And then I give up.
It's only now dawning on me that putting stuff online isn't a given. It's an option. It might mean that fewer people see the stuff I make. That's okay, though. What matters to me is that I enjoy making stuff.
