New pottery technique videos

I'm excited to be shooting several pottery videos a week. I've wanted to do it for a long time.

My technological process is anything but fancy: I'm shooting the video on my iPad Mini, with the microphone jammed to mute it (settings don't seem to mute like they should). Then, I open it in some dubbing software and add a voiceover. It helps me to be doing one thing at a time, either throwing or talking about throwing. I do it during class all the time, but somehow I like the separation when I'm making the videos. After I like the audio, then I upload it to YouTube, add tags and annotations, and publish it. I feel so accomplished.

The most recent set of videos features the technique for making large, flat serving platters. From a teaching standpoint, I decided to make the same style of platter from different amounts of clay. The amounts of clay were 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 pounds, each in its own video. The list of weights might not mean much to non-ceramics people. But if you work with clay at all, you'll know that this range is roughly equivalent to "probably easy" to "a little challenging" to "fairly challenging or gently impossible (depending on your experience.)"

I directed some traffic to the hardest technique and have gotten a lot of views from a ceramics online community. It means a lot to have complete strangers comment on your work.

Here's a demonstration that shows the making of a 4.5 pound platter. Enjoy!