Failing isn’t exactly something I look forward to. In fact I tend to avoid it if possible. However I have come to embrace learning from failure rather than fearing it. With innovation comes risk and with risk comes falling on your face. And after three years of podcasting I nearly consider myself a face-planting expert.

As the third season of Hak5 comes to an end and we begin pre-production on the fourth I turn my attention to once again attempting to streamline the production. With every new season comes new challenges and it becomes ever more apparent that the show revolves around the (seemingly rotating) cast and their lives, not the other way around.

This makes it ever more important to streamline the production process so that content can take center stage.

I’ll give an example. Aside from having merely a vague idea of what we were doing in our first season we at least had a clue about production quality. We didn’t exactly know how to make our videos look great but we did know what we didn’t want. Much of this comes from a disgust of barely audible, horribly lit videos that litter social video sharing sites today. And much of the time the messages in these videos are rich and human and yet so lost in poor production that I rarely pay attention.

It’s a shame really as good production isn’t exactly the easiest skill to pick up. It seems as though you either learn “the way it’s done” in school or get creative with a lot of trial and error until you end up figuring out your own way. I lay somewhere between these two as my 90s stop motion Lego videos and never-realized film degree will attest.

In a recent post on my blog I detail three aspects of production that we’ve struggled with over the years. If this kind of stuff interests you I invite you to read more here.