Updates about next year

Happy New Year!

Hope you are doing well, are healthy, and have had a great holiday season. I apologize for being away for a good while now with no updates. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I want to go with the channel and my work. It has been a bit of a difficult year for me in a number of ways. I am very happy with the work that I have done in 2022, but at the same time I’ve been kind of beating myself up lately over not making as many videos this year as I would have liked to have done. When you add up the minutes I actually produced about the same amount of content as usual, but it just didn’t feel like it to me because the releases were so far separated from each other as the length of my videos has grown substantially in the past year and a half. I now have gotten to the point where I don’t fully feel comfortable with shorter subjects which is something that I would like to change.

In a way, my plan for 2023 currently is that I want to return to how I worked and made videos in 2019. Over the course of that year I produced seventeen videos, and was extremely happy with my progress in that time. This was done by still making long videos but separating them out with shorter ones in the middle throughout the year. But as I have gone along, personally I feel as if the length has gotten out of control from me and that the videos are steering themselves.

My creative thought process is always if it makes the video better it goes in even if it makes the runtime a good deal longer. And this was a manageable way to make videos until at some point it was not any longer where I find myself now. I’m really not happy with how inconsistent my release schedule has been, and so after making the Joann video I decided to really focus on what I want to do and how I want to go about that.

I’ve made what I feel to be a very reasonable schedule for next year that contains twelve to fourteen videos that are ideas I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and have spent the past two months researching and pre-writing them to make this possible. I have dozens of script pages prepared so far for next year, and I think this is a very realistic goal for me that I am aiming to make. If I did seventeen in 2019, I believe I can get close to that again even though my standard that I hold myself to has gotten higher than it was at that time.

They are a mix of shorter videos and longer videos, and my main goal for next year is consistency and quality above all else in a way that is still healthy for me. From here on I also plan on making three to four franchise videos each year because they are always popular, are fairly easy to deliver in a timely fashion, and are something that I enjoy working on. And I think the presence of these throughout the year while I work on other weirder projects will keep things with a good feeling of variation to it all.

The video subjects in the planned schedule that I have been working on for next year is as follows:

January: The art of Remedios Varo

February: A video looking at the interesting storytelling devices in Marble Hornets

March: Carrie franchise

April: Alan Wake

May: not yet decided

June: Sleepaway Camp franchise

July: A video on the sculptor Tom Clark plus an undecided smaller video

August: Josh Kirby: Time Warrior

September: an undecided franchise video

October: Reviewing the entirety of Courage the Cowardly Dog

November: an essay on high fantasy horror

December: The Thing franchise

Now, some of this could change, videos fall apart on me sometimes midway and in that case I will try to replace them with something else. But I am feeling really good about this and am excited to return to a mix of shorter and longer content. Thank you again for all your support, and I look forward to this next year and seeing how this goes. Again, hope you have a great New Year, and I’ll see you again really soon.

-Zane