It’s been just over a year now since i started making board game videos for a channel called Nights Around a Table.

One of the reasons i wanted to tackle video is that it was always a mystery to me. Every so often, i would need to make a video to promote something i was doing. Try as i might, i could never figure out how to make a video look and sound decent.

i must say, i’m very pleased with the leaps and bounds in quality i’ve been able to achieve with a year’s worth of practice. The difference between then and now is stark! Here’s my latest video:

And here’s the very first board game video i made just over a year ago:

To be honest, most of the quality gains i’ve seen from the first video to the last were had by throwing money at the problem: over Christmas, i bought Very Big Lights, a smooth backdrop, and a lav mic, and started putting the (expensive) portable audio recorder i already owned to better use. But i also solicited advice from the more skilled audio technicians and photographers in my life to learn more about f-stops and single-band compressors and all the fiddly voodoo that makes a production look and sound better.

It’s nothing to you, but indulge me this little pat on the back for progress, recorded here for posterity! This time next year, i hope to appear as one of those fancy dead-musician-at-a-concert holograms.