Thanks, Bill. I know I've said it many times (too many times, I'm sure), but it's such a shame we have to live so far apart. The mind boggles to think of what we could accomplish working together on this stuff!

I see no point in offering criticism at this point; to wit, look at early episodes of Matt Chat to see how far I've evolved. During those early episodes I was learning so much that really any criticism was just overflow from my own new ideas and refinements. I still have plenty of ideas for improvements, though it is getting harder to implement them. For instance, I thought it'd be cool to have different camera angles at work when I'm recording my monologues, but that turned out to be very difficult in practice. I also grew much more comfortable in front of the camera; once the self-consciousness wore off I was better able to focus on content and getting the "emotion" across. I try to think of greeting a best friend and seeing him rather than a camera. I think it has actually made a difference. My theory is that if I look pleased and excited to see the "viewer," then the viewer will feed into that and feel better about himself and the content of the show. I definitely see that with the mancopter bit; you look very pleased with your own cleverness and that is contagious--appeals to the nerd in all of us when we're able to pull something like that off. You have a way of being "smug" about things that is not offensive but rather fun and even inspiring. The viewer wants you to be smug! I remember the older video where you pulled out all the different contraptions and ended up with "Why not the real thing?" I bet I wasn't the only one thinking, "hell, yeah!"

Also, I don't feel comfortable offering criticism since I am still a rank and raw amateur myself. It'd be like asking KFed for advice on hiphop. Besides obvious things you're likely already aware of, the only area that seems to drag a bit is the narration. I get distracted a bit because you are reading from a script. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you might try working from rougher notes (bulleted lists or outlines work well) and improvise more. I tend to do this and record segments over and over again, sort of like working through drafts of an essay. I usually keep the 5th or 6th take, never the first. I guess ideally I'd make a list of things I felt I "had" to mention and improvise the rest. I use "improvise" loosely here, since as I said, I tend to do bits over and over again until it feels right (sometimes dozens and dozens of times). Of course, another approach is the "spicing" route, just inserting more humor, anecdotes, funny voices (or just more emotion) to liven it up. Obviously, a lot of this will fall into place naturally as you do more videos.

I tried working from a script once and abandoned the idea quickly. Just didn't feel natural to me. I'd rather stumble/blunder through a few takes until the thing came together than try to plan too much ahead of time.