As of today we have officially replaced (almost) all the videos in our FREE Skin-on-Frame Prep Course. With over seven hours of content, this covers materials, tool selection, sharpening, safety, wood selection, making a coaming, laying out and plunge-routing the gunwales, laminating curved deck beams, cutting rolling bevels – basically all of the super efficient processes that I developed to prepare for my in person kayak building classes where we finished 6 kayaks in 6 days. It still kind of boggles my mind that I did that every few weeks for almost 15 years. I guess at some point I expected to grow up and get a real job but it just sort of never happened.
Transitioning to video instruction after my health failed in 2014 has been incredibly challenging. Not only because of how technically demanding it is, but also because I never stopped being sick. One of the reasons I stopped teaching in person is because my brain function is really poor these days. There’s times that I can speak to a camera with the same clarity and enthusiasm, but there’s a lot more times where I start talking and within 15 seconds my mind goes blank and I have no idea what to say next.
An average day of shooting in the studio usually has me doing 20-40 takes PER SHOT to get something usable and contrary to what it looks like I’m also just not much of an extrovert in the first place! It’s also surprisingly hard to act casual when you’re saying something for the 40th time with a 3 foot diameter glowing disk 4 feet from your face!
This makes every day a slog and every finished video a victory. A typical day has us shooting for 8 hours, spending an hour on social media content, editing for 2 hours, color-correcting for 1 hour, and then using the gaps in between to manage orders, emails, and the technical backend of all the websites and payment platforms that interweave to create our user-facing platforms. Somewhere in there I also try to find time to actually build boats!
It’s kind of a weird life but it has enabled me to keep teaching people all over the world while I fight the battle against chronic illness. Thank you to Liz, and to everyone who has taken my courses. -Brian
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
