The Japanese summer has changed the way I make drone videos.

Not because I planned it that way.

It is simply hot and humid enough that going outside to fly isn’t particularly attractive at the moment. More importantly, I don’t think making another YouTube video is worth risking heat stroke for.

Normally I would go somewhere, fly, record something new, edit it and publish it.

Instead, since the beginning of August, I’ve been doing something different.

I’ve been looking backward.

Every day, I’ve been picking a moment from one of my older long-form drone videos and publishing it as a Short, with a link back to the original video.

Initially, I thought of this mostly as an experiment.

Could a Short introduce somebody to one of my older videos?

Would somebody who watches thirty seconds become curious enough to watch thirty or even sixty minutes?

I don’t know.

But while going through my old videos, another question started becoming much more interesting to me.

Why did I assume those videos were finished?

I Already Published Them

The normal lifecycle of online content seems obvious.

Make something.

Publish it.

People watch it.

Views eventually slow down.

Make the next thing.

An old video gradually disappears into the archive while everyone’s attention moves toward whatever comes next.

I had been thinking similarly about my own videos.

They were done.

Some of my early FPV practice videos are quite long. Thirty minutes. Forty minutes. Sometimes close to an hour.

They aren’t highly polished highlight reels.

They contain practice.

Repeated attempts.

Mistakes.

Crashes.

Ordinary flying.

Small improvements that might barely be noticeable to somebody else.

When I watch them now, though, I’m surprisingly entertained.

Not because I’ve forgotten how the video ends.

I notice things.

Look at how cautiously I approached that.

I remember struggling with this.

My turns looked completely different.

I had forgotten that happened.

The video hasn’t changed.

I have.

I Can’t Make Those Videos Again

This is something I hadn’t really considered when I originally published them.

I can take the same drone outside tomorrow.

I can return to the same location.

I could even try to recreate the same flight.

But I cannot become the pilot in that old video again.

I know things now that I didn’t know then.

I could deliberately fly badly, but that isn’t the same as genuinely not knowing how to do something.

The hesitation was real.

The mistakes were real.

The learning was happening while the camera was recording it.

What might once have looked like technically inferior footage now contains something I can’t reproduce:

a previous version of myself.

That reminded me of something I’ve recently discovered while looking through the oldest posts on this blog.

I don’t want to rewrite them.

Some aren’t nearly as articulate as what I can write today. Sometimes I noticed something interesting but didn’t know how to follow the question very far.

But that’s exactly why I want to leave them alone.

They show what I could see and express then.

Rewrite them today and I would erase some of that history.

My old videos aren’t so different.

New Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Original

This also made me reconsider something I’ve been thinking about with YouTube.

As a drone enthusiast, I see plenty of new content.

A new drone appears and soon there are comparisons, range tests, battery tests, specification videos and beautifully edited cinematic footage.

There is nothing wrong with that.

People want those videos.

I’ve made technical and comparison videos myself.

But something being about a new product doesn’t necessarily make the idea itself new.

And the reverse may also be true.

Something made from old material isn’t necessarily an old idea.

I can take footage recorded a year ago and notice something in it today that I couldn’t have noticed then.

The footage is old.

The relationship is new.

That made me wonder what we actually mean when we talk about creativity.

Creativity Doesn’t Start With Nothing

We sometimes talk about creating as though something appears from nowhere.

But that isn’t how most creativity works.

We combine things.

Reinterpret them.

Put something into another context.

Look at it from another perspective.

Ask a different question.

The raw material can already exist.

What’s new can be the relationship between the pieces.

That is exactly what I’m doing with these Shorts.

I’m not pretending the flight happened yesterday.

I’m returning to something that already happened and asking:

Is there a moment here worth seeing again?

Sometimes there is.

And the moment I select today isn’t necessarily the moment I would have selected when I originally edited the video.

Time has changed what I notice.

A Short Can Be a Different Door

I still don’t know whether my experiment will work.

Someone might watch one of my Shorts and immediately swipe to the next one.

That’s how Shorts are often consumed.

Someone else might become curious, follow the link and discover a much longer video they would otherwise never have seen.

We’ll see.

But I’ve stopped thinking about the Short merely as a shortened version of the original video.

It can be another entrance.

The long video contains the experience.

The Short says:

Look here.

Maybe someone enters.

Maybe they don’t.

And perhaps someone who watched the original video before encounters that moment again and notices something they missed.

That possibility interests me more than simply extracting the most spectacular thirty seconds.

Long Videos Preserve Something Shorts Can’t

This also made me appreciate why I still enjoy some of those long videos.

A Short can show a successful maneuver.

A longer practice video can show what happened before the successful maneuver.

Attempt.

Mistake.

Adjustment.

Another attempt.

Improvement.

The meaning isn’t necessarily inside one moment.

Sometimes it exists in the distance between two moments.

Compress everything into highlights and we preserve the result.

Leave enough time and we can sometimes preserve the process.

That’s valuable to me because learning FPV was a process.

I didn’t suddenly become better.

I crashed.

Tried again.

Made tiny improvements.

Repeated things until movements that required concentration gradually became more natural.

A perfectly edited montage of my best flights could never preserve that in quite the same way.

Perhaps an Archive Isn’t Where Creativity Ends

This is where my little summer experiment connected with something completely different.

My garden.

Years ago, when I started experimenting with composting and permaculture, I began looking differently at things I would normally have considered finished.

Kitchen scraps.

Dead leaves.

Cardboard.

Weeds.

They had finished one purpose.

That didn’t necessarily make them useless.

A dead leaf doesn’t have to remain a leaf to continue participating in the garden.

It decomposes.

Becomes part of the soil.

Something else grows from it.

I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, but looking through my video archive has started feeling surprisingly similar.

A long video can be finished as today’s upload.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it is finished as something else.

It can become a Short.

A memory.

A comparison with how I fly today.

Evidence of progress.

A doorway for somebody discovering my channel years later.

Or simply something I enjoy watching again.

The original doesn’t have to disappear for any of those things to happen.

My Blog Is Becoming an Archive Too

I’ve been discovering the same thing here.

I’ve written more than a thousand posts.

For a long time I thought mostly about the next one.

Recently I’ve been returning to some of the earliest posts instead.

Not to rewrite them.

To see what I left behind.

An observation I didn’t investigate.

A question I didn’t know I was asking.

An assumption I never tested.

Those old posts have become raw material for new investigations.

When I published them, I couldn’t possibly have known what I would eventually find inside them.

Their role changed.

They went from:

something I wrote

to:

something I can think with.

Perhaps that’s what an archive can become.

Not a graveyard of finished work.

A place we can return to.

Finished in One Role

This connects with another question I’ve been investigating recently: knowing when something has genuinely finished with us.

Sometimes it has.

Not everything needs to be kept forever because we might find another purpose for it.

An old possession can simply need to go.

An activity can stop being interesting.

A project can be finished.

A video can contain nothing I particularly want to revisit.

That’s fine.

But I think I’ve been confusing two different things:

finished

and

finished in this role.

A cardboard box has finished being packaging.

That doesn’t tell me whether it has another use.

A flight has finished being today’s experience.

A video has finished being today’s upload.

An old blog post has finished being today’s thought.

What happens next depends on whether I can see another possibility.

The Heat Made Me Look Backward

Had this summer been cooler, perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about any of this.

I probably would have gone outside.

Flown somewhere.

Recorded something.

Made another video.

There would have been nothing wrong with that.

But the weather interrupted my usual cycle.

Instead of asking:

What can I make next?

I started asking:

What do I already have?

And I discovered something surprisingly abundant.

Years of flights.

Mistakes.

Experiments.

Places.

Progress.

Moments I’d forgotten.

Not everything needs another life.

But some things apparently weren’t as finished as I thought.

Maybe creativity isn’t always making something that didn’t exist before.

Sometimes it is combining existing things differently.

Sometimes it is changing context.

Sometimes it is returning with more experience.

Sometimes it is simply noticing a possibility that wasn’t visible the first time.

And perhaps that’s another reason I shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss something merely because it is old.

Finished in one form doesn’t necessarily mean exhausted of possibility.

Sometimes I need to make something new.

And sometimes I need to look at what I already made and ask:

Maybe it isn’t finished yet?