As of today Liz and I are officially halfway through re-shooting the entire Skin on Frame Canoe Building Course! This is a huge accomplishment not just because of the work involved but also just the personal challenge of teaching in the context of some pretty savage medical issues with brain function. On average of these days it takes me about 30 or 40 tries to get a minute of usable video and then we go onto the next minute and the next minute. It’s incredibly tough but at the end of the day when everything is edited together it’s really satisfying to see it come together so concisely. It seems crazy to me that both of us working for 8 hours can only create 20 minutes of video but brain issues aside that’s just the nature of video work.
Whole course re-shoots are exhausting but also critical to consolidate updates as the boats and systems continue to evolve, much of which is driven by student feedback. Sometimes I think the biggest value here is just the time saving process tips and the reminders to avoid mistakes that will end up costing you a bunch of time or money.
Stuff like remembering to peel the masking tape during the coating process at 5 hours because at 5 hours and 15 minutes you’re going to be doing it with a razor blade for the next 2 hours instead. Or flipping every rib the opposite way while steaming because if you don’t do this even though your boat will look perfectly symmetrical when you’re done, three days later it will be massively lopsided because your steam box is always slightly cooler in the front than the back and the tension in the wood changes. Or remembering to always wipe the oil off the bottom of your frame last because if you don’t tiny trickles of oil will sneak out of the mortises overnight and load up in your lashings and you won’t notice it until the skin is halfway on and all these little oil spots start to appear. None of this is rocket science, just stuff you wouldn’t think of unless you’d been there before.
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