Oh, we doin' video now, huh?

Published on: Oct. 20, 2025 @ 11:00
Written with ❤️ by drmorr

You may have noticed a couple things about this blog over the past couple years: a) I exclusively write long-form posts that are probably a touch too rambly, with wayyyyy too many footnotes1, and b) my last two posts have both been video posts that are thinly-disguised advertisements for SimKube.

Have no fear, gentle readers, my rambly, footnote-laden, erratically-posted long-form text content isn’t going anywhere! These video “things”2 are just part of my brilliant-but-subversive strategy to get many people to give me money so that I can coast comfortably for the rest of my life3.

In seriousness, though, despite my love of long-form text blog posts that go into way too much detail, it’s relatively well-known that a lot of the world prefers videos, and I would like to be able to reach those people. Also, KubeCon is coming up in just under a month4 and I am trying to get as many people as possible to be aware of SimKube before KubeCon so that when I’m there I can have a solid list of folks to meet with. In this post, I thought it might be interesting to briefly talk about my process with these videos.

Videos are hard, maaaaaan

I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t like making video content. Maybe that’s obvious. I’ve also done a decent amount of it over the years, so I know JUST ENOUGH to know how hard it is, and also how to make really bad videos. So for this SimKube series, I really decided I wanted to lean into the “cheap, goofy, barely-TikTok-worthy” vibe, partly because it’s easy5, and partly because it leans into the slightly-off-the-beaten-path model of ACRL in general. My goal has been to make videos that take no more than an hour to film, and under 2 hours to edit.

I have accumulated a fair bit of equipment over the years to help with this goal. I have a nice camera and tripod because I still occasionally do photography as a side hobby (though much less than I used to). I have a couple different microphones: one is the built-in mic for my Bluetooth headset, which does hardware noise cancellation on the mic itself6, and another directional mic that I picked up several years ago the last time I had to make some videos. And lastly, I have downloaded DaVinci Resolve which is a professional-grade video editing software that comes with an extremely capable free/community edition that is easy to learn and use. Given that I am explicitly not trying to make professional videos here, this is perfect for my use case.

And that’s pretty much it for my equipment and setup! Now let’s talk about the process.

Script? What script? Where we’re going, we don’t need scripts

All of the videos that I’ve filmed thus far have basically come down to an idea in my head, a few simple notes in Notion, and then I just sit down and improv the rest. This helps me keep to the low-budget, low-time-investment process. But I do spend some amount of time up front thinking about who my audience is and what I want them to take away from it. Aside from just “brand awareness”, my main goals with the videos are a) to make somebody laugh, and b) to highlight some aspect of SimKube that they might not be aware of or thought about. My first video tried to answer a really basic question that someone brand new might ask: “What’s SimKube?” This led me straight to the Mashed Taters meme from Lord of the Rings, and since I already have a vast collection of LotR Legos, the rest of the video fell out extremely naturally.

The second video tried, in a roundabout way, to identify one of the main problem domains that SimKube is designed to help with: scalability and capacity planning. It then quickly devolved into a wacky left-field bit about how to pronounce various CLI tools and why we’ve (collectively) decided that we should end all our CLI tools with ctl. The inspiration for this video is ffmpeg guy, which I continue to maintain is one of the finest pieces of art and satire on the Internet. This video, unfortunately, took way too long to both film and edit, and I think it’s too long to be an effective advertisement as well7.

The third video (coming this Wednesday) definitely hit the sweet spot for time and complexity. A friend and I filmed it in about 45 minutes, it took just about an hour and a half to cut and edit together, and it is, objectively, hilarious. Aren’t you excited to watch it?

Being hypocritical is fun and easy

Once the videos are ready, I post them on a variety of social media platforms; here (obviously), YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok8. They go out on a weekly schedule; I’ve been posting them on Wednesdays at 10am. Once they’re posted, I spend $100 to boost the video on LinkedIn.

Everybody: But David, don’t you hate advertising with a fiery burning passion?

Me: Sure do.

Everybody: Soooooo you’re paying for LinkedIn advertising because…?

Me: Because I’m a hypocrite, obviously.

Moral/ethical qualms about advertising aside, it has been fascinating to peek into the world of targeted advertising. I can definitely see why people and companies dump so much money into it. For my first video, I also put $100 into a YouTube promotion, because I was curious to see how it compared to LinkedIn: the main difference is that on LinkedIn, you can do some very specific targeting for who you want to see your videos: what industry, what level of experience, geographic location, etc. etc. etc. On YouTube, I got to select “geographic location”, “gender”, and “age range”. So while I got about twice as many “impressions” on YouTube as I did on LinkedIn, I got more “watches” on LinkedIn that YouTube, and I can just about guarantee that nobody who saw the video on YouTube is going to care (or even know what the heck I’m talking about).

The future of video at ACRL

So anyways, that’s why you’re seeing videos show up here more regularly. The rough strategy here is to produce a bunch of silly, fun short in the ramp-up to KubeCon. If I get one person at KubeCon to tell me “I saw one of your videos on LinkedIn, it was hilarious”, I will consider that a win. Post-KubeCon, I am hoping to transition to some more informational video content. As much as I love my long-form blog posts, there are a lot of people out there who are going to bounce off them hard—and that’s totally fine! Different people have different preferences and learning styles, but that means that if I stick to just long-form rambling posts, I’m neglecting a potentially large audience. So while the frequency of videos will probably lessen after KubeCon, I’m still hoping to have ~1 video/month with some short informational content about SimKube and/or the work that I’m doing around here. Along with the occasional quirky Lego-filled SimKube advert, because those have been heckin’ fun to make.

As always, thanks for reading (and watching)! Until next time,

~drmorr

  1. My editor insisted that I put that in; I maintain that there is no such thing as too many footnotes. ↩

  2. My editor wanted me to call them abominations, but I refused to make that change. ↩

  3. My editor informs me that I’m saying the quiet part out loud and I shouldn’t do that. On the other hand, my editor is a dumb poopy-pants and I’m not listening to him anymore. ↩

  4. Eeeeep!!!! ↩

  5. Well, easier. ↩

  6. This is honestly amazing: I can be sitting in an incredibly noisy coffee shop and the person on the other end won’t be able to tell at all. ↩

  7. I may also be biased against it because I strongly dislike watching videos of myself. ↩

  8. Yes, ACRL has a TikTok. I mostly started it because I thought it would be funny, but literally nobody—zero people!—have watched the videos on there. Don’t you feel sad? You should feel sad. You should all go watch the videos to make me feel better. ↩