AUGUST 2020
We finally get round (actually Tony) to gathering together all of our old boating videos and start re-editing them to upload to YouTube.
Tony already had a channel which contained some old home movies as a way to share them with family and friends, but now to make it a bit more “professional.”
To be honest, when we finally got round to doing the intros and outros (the bits of us you see at the start and end of each video) we were both a bit nervous and had to write a few things down first in case we forgot anything to mention. You would never believe we have both performed in front of thousands of people before! Perhaps its an age thing.
WHATS IN A NAME?
Anyway, we had to think of a name for our channel. We toyed with “Laceys Afloat” as that’s our surname, but there are already some Boat Tubers (the collective name for Boating YouTube vloggers) with similar names.
It was Jan who came up with the name as she always says that we’ve got plenty of old memories we can draw upon as we started to throw away several boxes of old junk. Why did we need old bits of paper? One day she just said “Tony, we’re going to make new memories.” And suddenly we realised that thats exactly what we’re going to be doing – Making New Memories. Ones that we can add to the numerous old ones we have.
Filming completed, it was all edited and uploaded to YouTube. How would people take to us and our old family footage? Surely no one would find it interesting.
We were surprised that lots of our old friends were keen to see what we’d been doing, and more importantly, what we looked like. “Oh look! Tony’s got a beard!! Hello Captain Birdseye…can I book you for Christmas, Santa?”
The cheek! Of course we took it all in fun – Tony hasn’t shaved the beard off …yet…and it was lovely to hear from people we hadn’t seen for years. And of course it was also great to see other people join in and start to follow our journey.
We then thought about what other videos we could make which would help people understand what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and our plans. Plus, we thought there maybe people out there who are in the same situation as us – waiting to sell and move onto a narrowboat, I mean, we can’t be the only ones in that situation.
Tony had already done the figures looking at our monthly outgoings and watching vlogs about potential costs of a life onboard so we thought about sharing our own figures, even though, for us, money isn’t the key reason why we’re changing our lifestyle, but we know that it is a consideration for many people. So, armed with a spreadsheet (and Tony has done many of them connected with our future lifestyle!) he set about filming a dedicated House vs Narrowboat Cost vlog. It certainly got a few responses and judging by the “likes” it has hopefully helped some people.
And, as we’ve discovered, there’s never a dull moment when you have to think about YouTube content….what would we do for our next one???
Tony & Jan
