The thing about picking up a hobby is that if it produces anything, you need to figure what it is you’re going to produce. Playing games is mostly about what you like, what you feel like playing at the time, and then acquiring the game you decide on. This whole video thing I’ve got going on is the opposite because I have to come up with ideas on what to make.

The sky on ideas is not the limit on account of how I don’t have the following:

• Decent cameras
• Any sound equipment
• People to work with
• Access to a 3D modeler
• Money
• Skills

My time thus far has been spent taking tutorial videos on the web, following along, and figuring out how I can use whatever I have around me to apply the lesson. The practical results have been woefully few and far between, so I’m scrounging for ideas — any ideas — on a new direction.

My most recent thought was to take stock video from MotionArray.com and splice it together into some wacky infomercial or something. For example, if you’ve never seen the criminally short-lived comedy Better Off Ted then you’ve been living a sad and hollow existence, but more importantly for the purpose of our discussion each episode featured some in-show commercials for the character’s employer, Veridian Dynamics, which mimic the exact kind of non-informative, near-dystopian HR-esque bullshit you’d expect from a callous government contractor-slash-children’s wear manufacturer:

It’s painfully obvious that these commercials are just stock footage edited together. The show-runners probably put a lot of thought into making commercials that are obviously trying to promote the company in the most round-about, non-committal way possible, and agreed that loosely coupled stock video was the blandest, most inoffensive and potentially confusing way to get their aimless point across.

I think I want to do this. It’s not really involving VFX, but it will involve audio and video editing, constraining content to limited time, writing, and recording. More importantly, it’ll give me a concrete goal to work towards.

So if you work for a similarly soulless corporation — and you know you do! — and can think of some of the lamest bullshit that they’ve tried to get you to buy into, drop a comment with details about the campaign and we can see if we can dig up enough relevant footage to make a short infomercial showcasing how pointlessly malicious corporations can be.