Filmed myself throwing instead of making. Seven videos in and I understand nothing.
ok so against my better judgment I started filming the studio work. vertical, phone balanced on a bucket of grogged stoneware, the fancy one. seven videos in and here is what I actually learned.
the timelapse of me building a vessel got 400 views. the one where I talk through what I'm doing, 90 views. the one where the piece collapsed at the end and I just said "vale, pues" and kept my hands in the clay, 6k. six thousand. on a collapse.
so the thing everyone tells you, "teach, give value, be useful," is apparently worth 90 views. me failing quietly is worth 6k. I don't know what to do with this information. am I supposed to build failure into the schedule now? break things on camera for the algorithm?
the part that actually bothers me is I film so much worse when I know the camera is there. my hands get self-conscious, I over-explain, I do the little laugh. and then I'm editing at 1am instead of, you know, making the thing that the account is supposed to be about.
anyway I sold two pieces from the collapse video, so. maybe the answer is just keep failing where people can see it.
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the "vale, pues" one doing 6k is the whole thing in a nutshell. nobody wants the class, they want the bit where it goes wrong and you don't flinch. i've a stack of failed hare proofs in a drawer i'd sooner show people than the ones that came out clean, cos the clean ones tell you nothing about anything.
the "teach, give value" advice is mostly handed out by people selling courses on how to give value. put your hands in the clay and say nothing is the value. 90 views on the talking one isn't the audience rejecting teaching, it's them rejecting the version of you that's performing teaching.
that said i'd not chase the collapse either. you can smell when someone's engineering the disaster by video four. keep filming, keep the good ones and the ruined ones, and the ones that land will tell you which you are. mine turned out to be the ones where i'm cursing.
The failed hare proofs, yes. I have a drawer of those too, mostly heads that went wrong at the jaw, and they are more instructive than the ones that sold. A clean proof is a magician's trick, you see nothing. A broken one shows you the seam.
But I would push back a little on the idea that they don't want the class. They don't want the class on camera. The teaching that happens when your hands are already in it, when you stop narrating and just fix the thing, that is still teaching. It is just not a lecture. The 90 views rejected the teacher's voice, not the knowledge. C'est ça.
"the 90 views rejected the teacher's voice, not the knowledge." vale, that one lands and I'm annoyed about it because it's true. I had the whole script in my head, the pauses, the little "so what I'm doing here is". and the six thousand were watching me just... keep going. hands still in it. no voice at all.
the seam thing. yes. a clean one you can't see where you decided anything. the failed one shows every decision, including the bad ones. I have a bowl that warped and you can literally see the moment I stopped paying attention, it's a whole confession in the wall.
so maybe the class is still there, just I have to stop announcing it. I'm going to try one where I only talk when something actually goes wrong, and otherwise shut up. probably it'll get 90 views too and I'll learn something else.
the hare proofs thing is going to live in my head, joder. "the clean ones tell you nothing about anything" and then a drawer of them you'd rather show than the sold ones? that's the whole post right there and I only got half of it.
but here's where I push back a little: I don't think the audience rejected the teacher. I think they rejected the script. the talking video had me doing the little presenter voice, the pauses where I breathe before the big point, all of it rehearsed. the collapse had zero script, so there was nowhere for me to hide and nothing to perform. same knowledge, one of them was me pretending and the other one was just me. so maybe it's not "don't teach", it's "don't do the voice".
because I actually want to teach. that's the annoying part. I want to explain why the wall was too thin at the shoulder, that's real, people need that. I just have to figure out how to say it with my hands still in the clay instead of standing back and pointing at it like a museum guide.
and yes, the course-selling thing, you're not wrong, but I've also learned plenty from people who sell courses, so I'm not going to throw all of them in the bin. some of them just forgot that the useful part was never the structure. it was them being honest about what went wrong.
you sell the hare proofs or keep them? because if you're sitting on a drawer of instructive failures, that's a post. I'd watch that over any glaze recipe on the internet.