- Hey there! You’re looking great today. How do you feel about reading a status report? Alright, then let’s go!
Recap: there’s a budget of $3,000 per month to produce video content each month, providing learning & enablement content to incoming customers and FOX token holders. These are your FOX Tokens that you voted on, so I always want to be transparent on what is happening.
October Retrospective TL;DR:
I’ve been focusing less on “finishing lots of videos” and more on organizing my thoughts and charting out my roadmap in Notion, so I have a fairly complete plan.
Some high-level accomplishments this month are:
Gathering topics via meetings with other workstreams to discuss their communication needs, resulting in a lot of great content ideas.
- Posting a few new videos this month, linked below.
Did two collaborative NFT art pieces with
- .
- I helped with the POAP artwork backlog, making 9 animated POAPs.
- Starting helping out to provide brand guidance and design ideas for the newsletter.
- I was out for a full week for an off-site meeting at my full-time job.
- Some high-level concerns are:
I am functioning not only as a video editor, designer, and producer, but topic creator, writer, researcher, and subject matter expert.
- Because of this, the workload has turned into a full-time job with part-time pay, on top of my other full-time job.
- I am hopeful to lighten the load on this project in the next month, to increase my output and lower the workload.
What went well:
I’ve taken the time to step back, get organized and come up with a plan. I now have a fairly complete Notion board outlining the project, with the content outlined through the end of the contract.
Here is the link to the live Notion board:
If you don’t like links, here is a picture:
As you can see there are four videos completed and six in progress, of 15 total. The overall roadmap is taking shape to define a user journey of novice user to voting / participating user.
What didn’t go well:
Now to be Donny Downer.
Something I am realizing is that I really
- should have defined the scope of this project a little better, as there are a huge number of things involved when we say “Make a video.”
The process generally looks something like this:
Determine a story that needs to be told
- Determine the focus, voice, and target viewer of the story
- Have an SME (subject matter expert) outline all of the components for the story
- Have the video producer unpack all of these components into separate ideas
- Put those ideas into a script that articulates the story
- Visualize the ideas along a timeline via a storyboard
- Design, animate and edit the content into a video
- Compress, format, upload the video
My experience with ShapeShift before this contract was that the first three bullet points were largely handled by other ShapeShift members. I was assuming “make a video” to be taking direction from other leaders or workstreams and to have SMEs to lean on for expertise. For example, with the first “Tip.cc” video, the need was established, the focus was determined (e.g. get more users engaged by tipping them), and the process was outlined by community subject experts. From there, I took the outlined process, visualized it, and created the video.
But, with the work done so far, there is very little input and direction. Therefore, I am choosing topics, doing the research, writing the outline, unpacking the ideas, being the producer, writer, subject matter expert, as well as the animator, designer, and editor. To do this for one video every week is a full-time job in and of itself, and it’s just not sustainable.
What to do now?
Step 1, complain about it on a forum. Check.
Step 2, restructure and simplify. I’ve structured many of the topics to be covered to be slightly overlapping, or more simple in scope. For example, support needs some content to show how to send/receive tokens. However, this is needed for 4 different platforms (mobile, web wallet, web KeepKey wallet, Portis.) So we can overlap much of the research and share some editing tasks between them. Some videos left on the list are sharing content from previous videos, such as exploring xFOX, or staking FOX / WETH on Polygon.
Beyond that, I might write a small proposal to add producer/writer services to the budget. This would likely be a small, one-time cost to cover additional services for the 4 months.
New videos!
Tutorial on using Figma to generate your POAP artwork:
What is a POAP?