Adventures in video

Last month we released the first in a series of Stack videos. I was really pleased with it – we interviewed Simon Esterson and John L Walters from Eye magazine, who spoke really interestingly about their work and the modern publishing landscape, and we framed it all around the concept of ‘A cup of tea with Stack’.

I loved that concept.

Around four weeks later, it has been viewed exactly 342 times. The feedback from Twitter and Facebook and people I actually spoke to face to face was that it’s too confusing. What is Eye magazine? What is Stack? And why would I want to have a cup of tea with it?

It’s too long. It doesn’t tell me what I’m going to get. It doesn’t focus on telling a single clear story.

In short, it’s been an absolutely fascinating process. I’m used to writing and editing stories using words on a screen or a page, but I’ve been amazed by how different the experience is when you throw in sound and vision. We’ve tried to learn from all that feedback for this month’s video, an interview with We Are Here founder, writer, editor, photographer and designer Conor Purcell.

We Are Here was the July delivery on Stack and I’m a massive fan. Conor was only in London for a few days so we caught up with him and got him to speak about how he manages to put together such a great magazine almost entirely on his own (Instagram plays a significant part).

I think we (I say we – all the real work was done by long-time Stack collaborator Tom Eagar) have done a great job with it, and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m about 10 times happier with this video than last month’s, but I know there’s still plenty of room for improvement, so if you do have any thoughts please share them in the comments below, or via Twitter or Facebook.