I don’t really want to become a content creator

I have been thinking a lot lately about the difference between posting my work and becoming a content creator, mostly because starting to post more seriously for the studio has made me realize that I had built a lot of rules around this in my head before I even really tried.

For me it was always pretty clear that talking directly to a camera, recording my everyday life or having to constantly put myself at the center of what I share was probably not going to be the way I did it. I’m pretty introverted, so obviously there is some of that in there, but I also just don’t think that kind of communication comes naturally to me. There are people who can turn a camera on and talk for three minutes and somehow it feels like you are sitting across the table from them. I watch them and honestly I envy that a little bit. I just know that if I tried to do the same thing right now it would probably feel like I was playing somebody else.

The problem is that for a while I let that become a very convenient excuse.

LinkedIn was where I started posting first. It felt safer somehow. I could share a website I was working on, an experiment, some tools I had been playing with, or write a few thoughts about a project and that was enough. Instagram felt like another world to me and I kept convincing myself that the people who actually succeed there are the ones who are comfortable being influencers, showing their face all the time, filming their day, doing talking-head videos, following whatever format is working that week.

I had a different version of the same excuse every time.

And the funny thing is that none of those things were really stopping me from posting. The bigger elephant in the room was that I hadn’t actually put in the work to figure out what my version of communicating could look like.

I finally opened the studio account and the last few days have been a pretty good reminder of how uncomfortable that process actually is. I’ll spend hours making something I really like, post it, start checking it more than I probably should and watch it barely move. Then something I made the day before, almost without thinking too much about how it was supposed to perform, gets seen by a lot more people.

My first instinct is still to immediately start doing an autopsy.

Was the hook bad? Was it too weird? Did I post too soon after the other one? Does this look too artificial? Should I have made a carousel instead? Is Instagram already deciding the account sucks?

Which is ridiculous when the account has basically existed for five minutes, but that doesn’t stop my brain from going there.

At the same time, this has probably been the part I didn’t expect: I’m actually having a lot of fun making the stuff.

A random image in my head can turn into a little film. I can spend half a morning learning how to color grade something in Resolve because I want the blue railing in a shot to feel more like old painted steel. I can make something strange, post it, hate it for twenty minutes, like it again later, and then have another idea because of something that went wrong in the first one.

There is something about that cycle that I’m starting to really enjoy.

And I think that’s where my perspective on all of this is changing a little bit. Maybe I had confused not wanting to communicate in one particular way with not wanting to learn how to communicate at all.

Because I do want people to see the work. I’m building a studio, so obviously I want the right people to find it, connect with something I make and hopefully at some point want to work together. Pretending that I don’t care about reach or whether something connects would also be bullshit.

What I don’t want is to reach a point where every idea starts by asking what Instagram wants from me.

I’d rather learn the platform while still making the things that make sense to me, whether that is sharing finished work, an unfinished experiment, something I noticed during a project, a weird little film, or sitting down and trying to write something like this.

And another thing I didn’t expect is that the line between doing this for myself and doing it for the studio is already getting blurry in a useful way.

I started learning some of these things because I wanted better ways to share my own work. Motion, editing, writing, thinking about why somebody stops on an image or why one idea communicates immediately and another needs five paragraphs of explanation. But those skills are slowly finding their way into client projects too, and they are changing the kind of work I think the studio can do.

So I don’t know if I have really solved the content creator question yet.

I still don’t see myself turning the camera around and documenting breakfast tomorrow.

But I’m posting more, some of it is going to suck, I still overthink it, and I’m finally starting to treat communication as another craft I have to learn.