Spent two hours on a 90 second video of a glaze session and got 340 views. The photo of the finished panel did better.
Sunday I set the phone on the easel arm and filmed a glaze session on the second figure. Two hours of footage, cut down to ninety seconds, the whole thing about how a thin warm layer over a dry cool one makes flesh breathe. I was pleased with it. Real information, no music, my hands in the frame.
340 views. My mother-in-law liked it.
This morning I posted a still of the finished panel, just standing against the studio wall, bad light from the window, no caption beyond the title. 1,800 views and four messages, two of them actually about the painting.
I keep telling students that the work is the thing and I keep believing it, but I also keep filming my hands. The algorithm wants the doing, not the done. Except it doesn't, apparently. It wants the done, photographed badly.
I am not going to become a content person about this. I would rather paint. But I am curious whether anyone else has noticed that the process content that supposedly performs just quietly does nothing, and it's the flat dead photograph of the finished piece that brings people to the door.
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The finished thing is the hook, the doing is the meal. But people can't tell from a still whether you know what you're doing. That ninety seconds is proof of hand, and it will keep working for you long after the panel is sold and gone. I work in mosaic, same problem. My process clips get a fraction of the views of a finished piece, and the people who do watch them are the ones who end up commissioning. Don't measure it by the number, measure it by who it reaches. 340 is small but it is the right 340.
ehh, half with you. "proof of hand" is real but it's not the 340 that matters, it's that they're usually the 340 who already care. i've had process clips do nothing for months and then one person who watched it all the way through emails me about a commission. the still gets the saves, the clip gets the clients. different jobs.
but also, sometimes the clip is just boring, and nobody wants to admit that. two hours of glazing can be genuinely hypnotic or genuinely nothing depending on where you put the camera. "proof of hand" doesn't rescue bad pacing.
The second half is the part I needed to hear. "Sometimes the clip is just boring" and I have been calling it "people don't value process." Both true maybe, but not equally.
Though I'll push back a little on where to put the camera. The interesting thing in glazing is not the brush, it's the twenty seconds where the paint goes from opaque to transparent and you can see the drawing underneath start to breathe. That is one shot. If I had filmed that and nothing else it would have been twenty seconds, not ninety, and probably a better film.
So maybe the problem was not the length or the music. Maybe I filmed the wrong thing for two hours.
"The right 340" is a good way to put it, and I think you are correct about the commissions. The people who watch ninety seconds of glazing without music are not the people who scroll past a still. They are already halfway in.
But I will say the mosaic detail is what caught me. Same problem exactly, and you have it worse: in mosaic the doing is almost invisible in a photograph. All those hours of cutting and setting, and the camera sees a flat surface. At least in oil the brushstroke carries some of the hand into the still.
So maybe the still is the door and the clip is the room behind it. People need the door first. I just wish they would knock more often.