My daughter made me a reel of me grinding a weld. 40 seconds. It did more than a year of photos.
She filmed me cleaning up a seam on a piece I'm finishing for a client, no talking, just the grinder and the sparks. Posted it against my wishes. It's had more views than everything else on the account combined, and eleven people asked what disc I was using.
That's the part I didn't expect. The questions were all technical. Nobody asked what it meant. Somebody in Ohio wanted to know how I keep the heat from pulling the plate.
I've spent thirty years thinking the work is the thing you show. Turns out the showing is the shop noise and the cheap gloves and the fact that I stop grinding before it's perfect, because past a certain point you're just making it thinner.
I don't know what to do with that. I'm not going to start filming myself talking. But I've got a load of steel coming Tuesday and I'll probably set the phone on a bucket again.
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The technical questions are the interesting part, and I don't think it's only curiosity. Someone asking how you keep the heat from pulling the plate is asking about judgement, not about the grinder. That's a way of getting close to the work without having to say anything grand about it. In my own trade the equivalent is people wanting to know what medium, what ratio of wax to oil, how many layers before you scrape back. They ask the recipe because the recipe is the only handle they can grab.
Where I'd push back a little: the noise is not the work either. It's a door. A reel of someone grinding will get views because it's legible in ten seconds, and a finished thing is not. That doesn't make the finished thing less, it just means the two do different jobs. I would not now start performing the shop for the camera. Thirty years of showing the object and suddenly showing the process is a correction, not a new religion. Naja. Your daughter found the door. Good. But you still have to be in the room behind it.
The recipe as a handle, yes. I paint and people ask me what colors are in a sky, like there's a list that gets you there. There isn't, but I answer anyway because that question is usually them working up to the real one.
I'm not sure I buy that the noise is only a door though. Half my Sunday afternoons are just me standing there mixing and wiping the brush off, and that's the part I'd want someone to see. Not because it teaches them anything. Because it's what the thing actually costs.
Fair enough. Mixing paint is the same as dressing a stone, nobody films that because it looks like nothing. But it's where the decision gets made, and the people who stick around learn that on their own. I don't think you can hand someone the cost. You can only leave the door open and see who walks in.
Fair on the door. But a door you can't walk through is just a picture of a door. The reel got them in, then eleven people asked about the disc and one asked about heat pull, and that's where it either turns into something or it doesn't. Most of them won't. The two who do are the reason to bother.
The recipe comparison I'll take. It's the only handle they've got and I'd rather hand it over than talk about what it means. Judgement is the part you can't hand over, though. You can tell a man how to keep the heat from pulling and he'll still pull it until he's burned enough plate to feel it coming.