Becoming a You-Tuber

"I used to drive to the fitness center, teach for an hour, drive home, and I was done.  Oh, and I got paid, too!  I never knew how good I had it."

I recently moved out of my house.  Well, not really, but a very big part of my life, my business, has officially found a new home in our Studio + Shop commercial space.  This has been amazing for so many reasons, but mostly those reasons are my linen closet and my spare bedroom.  I used to have all of my production supplies stored in our bathroom linen closet.  Our spare bedroom used to home all of my finished product, shipping supplies, and my “office”.  We had BIG plans for this spare bedroom to become, well, a SPARE BEDROOM with a bed, and guest stuff!  We have books and a television with a big, cushy bean bag for hanging out…this was going to be that place where guests could stay, kids could hang out, and the bed could be left unmade.  Then the coronavirus took hold of everything, and it all changed.

I’m still very grateful that I have this space, and that IKEA is closed so we can’t even go buy a bed if we wanted to (I really want to).  But that guest room has been put on hold because now it’s my You Tube studio.  Yep, like so many others, maybe even YOU, I’m officially a You Tuber.  I know for a long time I have made fun of a lot of the You Tubers my kids watch, wondering how people can actually make a living posting videos on-line of watching other people's videos on-line, but, honestly, this shit is HARD.  My last 37-minute Pilates video took me 3 hours to film, and 6 hours to upload (make that 7, because there’s still an hour and 32 minutes left, as we speak).  What the f*@k?  I used to drive to the fitness center, teach for an hour, drive home, and I was done.  Oh, and I got paid, too!  I never knew how good I had it.

Yesterday I filmed my first Pilates Circuit class, a class I invented (I’d like to think) and started teaching over a year ago.  I have taught this class every week, sometimes twice for quite awhile now.  I used to have to prep, now I could do it on demand, anytime anywhere.  It’s a GREAT class!  I shot it on two cameras, one froze halfway through, the other turned off with 3 minutes left.  I re-shot the last 3 minutes thinking I could just “splice” the two videos together, but then the storage on my tablet was too full and I couldn’t upload it to my google drive, to load it to my desktop, to load it into my movie editor that I don’t really know how to use anyways, to FINALLY upload it to You Tube.  Whew…that’s like 4 hours of my life I’ll never get back.  But, that was actually quite a blessing in disguise because during the video I had tripped over my weights more than once and the lighting made me look like I didn’t have legs, just a very dark mat.
 
My husband tried to talk me into re-flooring our office and repainting the background wall, and also moving my sewing and craft table out so I could create a studio space and film from our desktop computer.  Seriously?  This is temporary, right?  It’ll only be a few weeks, they said.  Just practice social distancing and we can send the kids back to school in April, they said.  We brought a lamp into the GUEST ROOM, and a clock so I wouldn’t run out of time, and I filmed the class again.  I’m actually really happy with how it turned out, and now we’re down to an hour and 23 minutes left to upload it.  Things are looking up, I say.  Oh, and did I mention I did all this for 26 subscribers?  Yep, I have a following.

I love teaching fitness classes, and I LOVE my students.  Of all the things I have had to adjust to during this super odd time in my life including (but not limited to); putting off an epic refill center grand-opening, creating new school subjects like "cleaning the chicken coop" and "watching cats play in trees", and changing my Netflix habits from watching Grace & Frankie in middle of the afternoon to a more age-appropriate title; my biggest worry is that my participants, those that come to yoga and Pilates every week, will stop practicing.  I’ve always been a group fitness enthusiast.  I do not work out at the gym alone, like ever.  I like schedules, and being around other people who like what I like, and instructors that I’m used to their style.  I know that’s why my students come, that’s why they bring their friends, and that’s why we all commit to our well-being, and to each other.  That’s why I’m doing this.  There’s a million online classes people could take anytime, for free.  But they come to me, so I have to be here for them.  Not to mention the abs of steel I am going to have from doing the same class 3 times in a row just to get it right for the 40 minutes my 26 subscribers will see.