Anyone that knows me knows how special the early days of YouTube gaming were to me. As a team leader and an editor, I rose pretty high in those times and developed skillsets that still serve me tremendously to this day. And for everyone involved in that era, you know how incredibly unique those times were.
But many moons ago, I lost almost all of my videos that I made earlier than 2012 and it still irks me to this day (I clearly have some detachment to do around this). I also didn’t know how to document my journey back then (I was like 13-16!), so I didn’t capture any real-life footage that I held on to — or so I thought.
I had accepted that from a visual storytelling perspective because I didn’t have any real-life footage, any time I mentioned the gaming days, I wouldn’t be able to show myself on that beige couch1which I’m sitting in a decade later to write the first draft of this, gaming my ass off, editing and leading teams in the early days of the “trickshotting community”, which years later, would morph into the billion-dollar industry that we now call e-sports. And even though I accepted it, it still really sucked.
But after I surrendered to a degree, in the week prior to moving — the miraculous occurred. Out of the blue, I had the idea to use AI to help me track down any possible leads and asked my Mom to search the word “couch” in our family’s google photos. And guess what? There I was. A photo of me in 20102I also recreated these photos with modern updates and they’re hilarious, doing exactly what I’d wished for. And it existed because a decade ago, my Mom ignored my request for her to stop taking photos and captured the moment anyways.3Sometimes Moms do know best, after all. I was overjoyed. Knowing that there was a raw, visual representation of me deep in the process at the time completely made my month.
In the following days, as we continued to purge the house in preparation for the move, my Mom brought me my old gaming laptop which I thought had completely died. Days prior, I was presented with a miscellaneous laptop battery and charger and even though I almost discarded it, I thankfully decided to keep it instead. To my surprise, I tried out the parts and they not only fit, but the laptop I thought was toast somehow powered on.
Due to leaving a hint for my password as my actual password (genius levels of security!) I entered my old desktop and look on in amazement at memories that I still recall to this day. It had raw gameplay of me and my friends playing for clips, in game b-roll 4Formally named cinematics to us Call of Duty editors. , Sony Vegas editing files, and other cool niche information that only people involved would appreciate and understand.
Of course, I’m still missing a lot. Because I didn’t have an archiving or storage system set up, almost everything aside from this has vanished into the abyss, save for the final videos that are still up to this day. If I was to do it over, I wish that at least once every 6 months, for key videos, I kept at least one project file (shoutout Sony Vegas and After Effects, my go-to’s at the time) and its raw footage to see my progress over time. I wish I had saved more images, real-life videos and moments/conversations with friends. And most importantly, I wish I had all of the final versions from videos on past channels that were unfortunately terminated. But thankfully the pain I feel from it taught me early on why documenting is so important.
Though I wish I had more of these memories and art from the past, however, keeping everything isn’t necessary. You may be like me and in theory, wish you had access to every little thing for forever 5because it can be challenging to know what’s important until you see it later in retrospect, but it’s not needed to properly document your journey. In my recent experience, I’ve found that so long as there are just enough photos, videos, audios and/or writing to highlight the key moments and essential points within the storyline (and as stories become more and more visual, ideally creating a visual representation, too), you can effectively communicate the desired message.
As much as I’d love access to footage from every day I’ve ever experienced or the transcripts to every thought I’ve ever had, much of it is mundane, repetitive and not useful to the stories I want to tell. And as humans, when we’re consuming, we want the least amount of information possible to hear the best possible story, aka the highlights. Oftentimes, we’d prefer the cliff notes instead of analyzing every bit of information from the journey.
With the gaming journey, I’m thankful that if nothing else, I still have the best work that I ever made along with some photos and videos of what the process looked like, too. As much as my ego would like to convince me that I need more than this, I really don’t. This is good enough.6Still trying to convince myself of this lol
If you’re new to this, here are a couple of tips from someone who’s been obsessed with documenting since around 2014.
Firstly, documenting can be a tricky thing because you can never quite know exactly what you may want or need in the future, but just trust your intuition. It will give you information that you could never have otherwise predicted with your limited mind and always saves your ass.
Secondly, you only need to capture something until it’s done right (with that set of major variables). That means, if I’m thinking the same thing over and over again, I’ll say it on video until the thought is communicated effectively — then I don’t need to say it again unless I want to. For example with capturing b-roll, if I’m always sitting on the couch working in the exact same way, odds are I only need to capture a couple of angles and if the footage is great, I don’t need to reshoot it again. But if new variables are introduced like a new office, a change in the style of clothes I wear or a new unit of time, then it might be time to capture some more footage.
All of this said, some people may ask, “Is it really worth it to document all of this? Do you ever actually go back and revisit any of this?” and the answer is “Hell yes.” Just as I experienced when I found these amazing archived materials— at a certain point, you’re going to go back and wish you had captured more from your journey. Not everything, but the essentials. The key moments. A photo here, a journal entry there. A video, a podcast, a voice note. As I’m going through these photos and videos, it feels incredible to have access to this content and has re-affirmed my thesis that documenting is incredibly worth it.
If you capture the essentials in your own life, journey and pursuits, someday you’ll thank yourself and those around you will appreciate it too. But if you don’t, you’ll eventually regret it because you, the people in your world and your lineage will lose out on the great stories of your life as your memory fades and you take your uncaptured stories with you to the grave.
Unfortunately, only a handful of you reading this will take this endeavour seriously and act on it. But those who do will be so grateful that they did.
The best time to begin documenting was the moment you were born. But the second-best time to begin documenting is right now.
