2018 - What will happen?

Hey all!

First off: Happy New Year! I hope all of you had a brilliant ‘slide’ (as we say in Germany) into 2018 and that this year will bring nothing but the best to you all.

I thought that this presents the best time to do a bit of a debrief of everything that happened with the channel in 2017 and talk about some of the things that lie ahead. 

For the first major change in 2017, my thanks go to all of you. 121 of you support me via Patreon as I write this message, roughly four times more than around this time last year. Your support makes a big difference. In 2016, community support allowed me to transfer from a struggling laptop to a desktop. It pretty much saved the enterprise.

In 2017 your support allowed me to buy the following things that benefit the channel:

• A second monitor: Helps a lot with edition/production and streaming,
• A lavalier mic: A clip-on mic for clear audio. While this was bought after all the museum visits I made so far, the mic has already helped me clean up audio for my regular videos. In the future, videos from museums will benefit too,
• Visit to the Finnish Aviation Museum (train ticket only) and Italian Aviation Museum (train ticket only),
• Two soft boxes: Soft lighting for vlogs or (if possible) in the field,
• A tripod: For less shaky cam (obviously), 
• To quote my girlfriend: ‘Way too many books on flying thingies…’.

The next acquisition:

• Camera: For 1080p@60FPS. I am still undecided on what model but will make my choice soon.

The second change was that we went a little bit more, for lack of a better word, professional. One of the things was of course reaching out to museums and working with them (or with their blessing) on museum visits. I want to expand this part of my content in 2018. The challenge here is of course getting the foot in the door. Not every museum values YT coverage and some have reservations about the medium. So while some museums get back very quickly, others don’t. I hope that the fact that I already have some videos will convince them to give it a shot. 

Expanding from that, we had a collaboration with MHV, The Great War and the United States World War One Centennial Commission. I want to make a push in 2018 and collaborate with a few chosen channels that I think will benefit the content with their expertise. One of the things I learned from all collaborations so far is that I need to be more selective with my topics and find something ‘engaging’. Both the collaboration with TGW and the USWW1CC were largely overlooked, most likely because they were WW1 content. For some reason, and I think TGW even confirmed this once, no one seems to care about WW1 aviation on YT. Sad but the data does not lie. The collaboration with MHV was also not as good as it could have been, probably mainly because of the topic.

As most of you have noticed, the presentation style of the last two to three videos was somewhat different than before. While I didn’t rely so much on footage from simulation games in those, I do want to keep this feature as I think it makes our content unique and visually stimulating. Nevertheless, most of my visual work went into producing engaging assets that clean up the presentation from the initial amateurish look to something a bit more sleek. The scripts have also improved, with less rambling and more information. Work is still to be had on both fronts.

Well, I could go on and on but I don’t want to bore you. Two more important things:

1. If you are an ‘Ace’ supporter ($10/month or more), you are entitled to have access to our Discord page. Please message me if you want it.

2. The first Q&A will come Q1 of 2018. Another question roundup post will come sometime January.

Alright, that’s it for now. Feel free to put any questions or comments below. 

Have a great one!
Bismarck