I’m posting this in May 2024, and I realize that it’s entirely possible that if you’ve found this post later in the year or some time in 2025, most of the embedded videos may be blank. For now, a brief story about how some TikTok videos I made after teaching class sessions led to my being invited to participate in the making of a video by and for Wesleyan University’s Office of Social Media.
It’s exhausting doing social media posts, doing one’s work and then trying to step outside of yourself to document something about it to post that’s attention-grabbing or intriguing enough to survive the endless game of Marco Polo of having an online presence. Still, I’ve been giving TikTok a whirl. I figure this is an audience I’m probably not reaching via emails and other socials. My bottom line with all of this is still “yes, but does it sell tickets?” – but I also recognize it takes time to build up anything that may lead to anything beyond momentarily entertaining anyone with a smartphone.
Halfway through the Spring 2024 semester I got an email from someone in the Office of Social Media at Wesleyan University, saying she’d enjoyed the TikToks I’d posted about my silent film course and inviting me to participate in making a “Day In The Life” video for Wesleyan’s social accounts.
Sure. Why not? I was actually expecting to receive a reprimand from someone in some department of the university to take these all down.
I took lots of very brief videos of what a typical Wednesday is like for me, and uploaded the footage to Anastasia Wright, Social Media Specialist at Wesleyan, who did a masterful job boiling it all down to 60 seconds. She also came to one of my class sessions to get footage of me lecturing and accompanying a film. The video posted to Wesleyan’s Instagram and other social accounts yesterday, and seems to have done exceptionally well on Insta.
I’m honored to have been asked to do this video, and got to use some of my filmmaking skills a little in the process, and managed to sneak in an homage to Ernie Kovacs at the beginning and ending. The Wesleyan “Day in the Life” video is below. And, if TikTok hasn’t been banned, you can scroll down and see the videos I made apré class this year that I posted to my account.
NOTE: the TikToks begin auto-playing as soon as you load this post in your browser. Which means what you’ll probably see are preview thumbnails for “related videos” instead of mine. These related videos are ridiculously unrelated. Just click on the counter-clockwise arrow-circle at the bottom left to see the actual video.