Great Takes Trying

I've never really considered myself to be much of a "superfan" - you know the type of people who are obsessed with one particular movie, actor, video game, or whatever, and then go and constantly relate everything that happens in their life to that obsession. Somehow my attention span never lasts quite that long. However as close as I've ever come was watching Zefrank's  "The Show "  - a vlog that ran (intentionally) exactly for 1 year starting on March 17 2006.

By the time I began watching, a few months after he started, each couple minute episode was a sparkling two-minute gem of humor, news and general goofiness that was a highlight of each workday. I remember sitting on the site hitting the refresh button waiting for that new episode to post.

Even while traveling and hungover, Ze would still manage to produce a nicely edited and humorous clip for the day:

Wanting more than just the daily episode I started watching backwards in time and came to a startling realization: the first few episodes of the show were, pretty "Eh". While they still were wacky and entertaining they were slightly stilted, sometimes slow and boring.

This absolutely boggled my mind - not because I was surprised that they early shows weren't that good - but because they became good so quickly. Ze is obviously an exceptional individual and performing for the camera came pretty naturally, but nonetheless, over the course of 1 month Ze went from a passable but sort of average video blog to a nicely edited, superbly paced, fall-over-funny nugget of Internet gold:

From (3/17/06):

To (4/20/06):

Better vocalization, better lighting, better facial expressions, better cuts - all around a much improved presentation.

I'd imagine there's plenty of people who do something similar - record a youtube video, do a screencast or write a blog - and then get discouraged because their first time around was barely passable. They look around at all the great stuff out there and think to themselves, why even bother? Well, the answer is that doing something great takes both trying it and spending some time trying to get better at it. You mileage may vary, but if it could really only take a month, isn't it worth giving it a shot?