Please enjoy the following stream of consciousness
This month’s prompt for Bay Area Kei’s Bibliotheca is “Challenges” so I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to write about my TikTok coord video “challenge” in 2022, and why I hated it so much by the end of the year.
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TikTok is a blight…
I finally made an account, mostly for my own “professional career research.” I had already seen a few friends share EGL coordinate videos on the app and wanted to join in on something that seemed like an easy way to feed the content machine, as well as document my coords throughout the year.
In January I started filming quick videos of my coords for TikTok videos. Nothing overly complicated, just a knee-up shot followed by a zoomed in video of details. That month I wore 3 coords, an above average number of coords for me usually but I was riding the high of a refreshed love for my wardrobe. The following months I continued planning coords and filming each of them almost every single weekend, creating an exact format that I could stick to — that I had to stick to. This would inevitably be my downfall.
Filming wasn’t actually very difficult but as the year went on I began to overthink my posing, editing, and the overall process. I was also in a constant battle with the lighting in my room, which only has good natural lighting for a few inconsistent hours of the day. If I didn’t have time to film before rushing out, I would need to make peace with the fact that I would have to fight the sun (or a lamp) later.
I’m not going to go into the actual editing process since I used a program on my PC, but I will say that it usually took several hours just to make a single <30 second video.
I made it this far, I might as well keep going!
After several months of consistency, I created this sense of obligation for myself and felt that I needed to keep that up with the 3+ coord quota. My schedule started to revolve on when I would film these videos. By June I started to deeply regret these videos because of how burnt out I was in general. It became a chore to even think about and I would get so frustrated if I hadn’t hit 3 coords yet by the final week of the month.
I know I really could have stopped at any point or worn less than 3 coords per month, but I had too deep of a sense of commitment. What was I trying to prove? I don’t even know, but whatever it was it had absolutely no chill.
Fortunately I made it to December and finished my coord quota early thanks to an in-person event.
It’s done.
Wearing EGL was never a negative thing for me and I’m not upset I wore it so much last year, but I do regret not taking the time to shoot anything else. One of my favorite things is to set up an elaborate photoshoot and spend the entire weekend fiddling around with fake blood, impractical outfits, and photoshop. Those kinds of photoshoots are incredibly time consuming so I wasn’t able to plan anything since I was prioritizing my coordinate videos.
Despite all the suckiness, there were still a few positive things that came from this challenge:
- I learned that I absolutely despise creating video content (lol)
- I was able to wear over half of my wardrobe in 2022 with only a few repeats, which was useful for helping me decide which pieces I wanted to keep or sell.
- I did it! I saw the entire year through and made a video every month.
This year I’m not holding myself to any kind of commitment like this and will only create what I want, when I want, how I want. I’ll still probably share a few coordinate dump videos throughout the year, but for now I’m sticking with still photos.
To end this post here’s a final word of advice for anyone looking to start up a similar project: Don’t overcommit! If you feel that you’re starting to hate this thing, take a break before you get too burnt out.*
*I say, after having set a new year’s resolution of 1 new blog every month…
Here’s a compilation of my 2022 Coord Videos! Check out my Instagram or TikTok for individual months and the detail shots: