First off, we need to pray & see if we really want to do this. If so we’ve thought of some possible solutions to the aforementioned conflicts.
 
Time

We can shoot on Monday and Wednesday nights after work. While it might not be the most recent news, we try to cover news you probably wouldn’t hear otherwise, so if it’s 12 hours later than before, I think that’s okay.
 
Editing

We would need to set aside a set amount of money per episode to pay an editor. They would have from 10pm Monday(/Wednesday) until 3pm on Tuesday(/Thursday) to finish the episode, set it to upload, etc. The only way I could see finding someone that committed to the project would be to pay them.
 
Impeding Location Change

We cannot fully plan for this until we see where we are both living in the next six months. SO all we can do about this one is pray.

I think it would be awesome to keep going. It is a lot of work though. There is a big time commitment and with us having to pay an editor, there is a financial investment beyond the initial $100 each. It is something that I still feel I need to pray on.

The proudest episode to date of ION is that of this past Tuesday. The story's were all interesting, and engaging, and Gino exceeded my expectations with the edit.

But it did not come without hardship. I received a text from Gino, our editor at 9:30am asking if he could skip editing this week. Jeremy had work and I had class, so it wasn't really going to work. SInce Gino starts editing at 10:30, it was short notice to scramble to make a plan. Since we were just finished shooting, I started to sync the footage and I did a rough edit on the first story. I left for class and Jeremy reedited the first and completely edited the second story. He then was able to pass it off to Gino who finished the stories and added assets. But that was just half the battle.

I needed to leave at 3:00pm. first cut of the episode was not ready from Gino until 3:15 pm. Without watching, I uploaded it and added the description, title, thumbnail, tags, etc. I left at 3:35pm and then got a text from Jeremy that there were mistakes in the edit. I was gone, but GIno was able to re-upload and take the info from my first upload. It all worked out and just so happens to be my favourite episode. 

ION has come so far from the first episode. If you go to our channel and scroll down and watch the first episode compared to Episode 14, it is so much better now. I think I have grown a lot in front of the camera in the past eight weeks and am grateful for it all. We have one more week of episodes for this project, and I am excited to see what note we end it on. 

There was some conflict with my co-creator this week in the he was traveling home on Monday night. This meant that he would not be around to shoot on our typical Tuesday morning. He suggested that we cancel our Tuesday video. I suggested that we shoot on Monday morning instead of Tuesday, so that we could still get an episode out. Then I learned he had too much work to help write the script for Monday. I knew that I personally needed to get an episode out on Tuesday one way or another, so I said I would write the whole script. 

This is not a story to speak ill of my co-creator. This story is a testament to making sure what happened last year on my channel, doesn't happen again. Last year I had very little accountability. I posted about four times in December, and then I ran out of steam. There was nothing pushing me to hit my deadlines for videos. So other things occupied the time instead. I basically stopped posting altogether, with the exception of one or two videos. I believe that skipping just one episode because it is difficult to do, creates a slippery slope of bad precedences. Therefore, I knew I needed to make Tuesday's show happen for me, if no one else.

We had planned weeks ago that we were going to not to an episode on Thanksgiving. Jeremy and I were both out of town and it didn't make sense to ruin the holiday by shooting and editing instead of spending time with friends. Since it was always planned to skip Thursday it didn't bother me like Tuesday did.

Today I missed half of my class for Role of a Producer becasue I fell behind on one of our episodes. There were a lot more assets that I had time for, so I had to decide between finishing the episode or going to class. I needed to stay committed to the project, so I finished the episode and then went to class. It was either that, or not get out Thursday's episode until like 8:00 pm, which is 11:00 pm on the East Coast. 

instead of the same old posts, I wanted to show a bit of the behind the scenes this week. This is a photo from a few weeks ago, but it is still the same setup that we have today:

We have a very basic setup. First of all, we are just in the corner of a garage. We have the set behind me on the right. Then my chair. In front of me is another chair with my laptop that has the script, and the microphone that is hooked up to my laptop. Jeremy sits in the chair all the way to the left, behind the camera. And we have two lights, using the ceiling as a bounce board. It is simple, and it works for us. There are ways that I would love to improve upon sound, but until we have some disposable income to invest in the project, I do not see that happening. So until then, we will keep going with the setup we have today.

Something that we started doing this week was including assets in hyperlinks in our script. This way Gino and I knew exactly what assets to put where. This worked a lot better then our first system of putting a code such as "3.5" (meaning Story #3, Asset #5) in the script and naming the asset the same way. Now while editing we can just click on the hyperlink and download the asset.

Our editor had a time conflict this Tuesday and Jeremy and I had to pick up the slack. However, it all got done. It was not an ideal situation, but we understand that Gino is volunteering with us, and if he cannot do an episode, we have to be understanding of that.

We got some notes from our first episode back and one that we heard over and over was that people seemed to love the parts where I was more animated, so we tied to include as much of that as possible. We wanted to make sure that the videos stayed engaging and people wanted to keep tuning in.

One of the first suggestions made by Gino was that we needed to switch up the thumbnails. Our first one was fairly basic. It had me in front of our standard background. But he suggested that we add elements from our story. For this week we added one specific element from the episode into the thumbnail. On Tuesday it was the bird coming out of the plane and on Thursday it was one of the fighting robots.

​Yesterday was our first episode of ION. It was a long-fought battle, but it was nice to see if finally go up. The ball is officially rolling, and I am looking forward to keep it going.

When we sat down with our graphic designer, the guidelines were: 1) Keep is Simple  3) Use the blue we earlier selected. To the left is what we received back. The image to the right is our favorite option on a Thumbnail test. 

Though we loved the last one with the globe, we ran into issues with the television network of the same name. Here is their logo:

 We wanted to keep the concept of the show global, so incorporating a globe was important to us.      So we sent our designer back to the drawing board with that in mind and here is what we got back:

We loved it and approved it for the show. It is simple and original. I'm glad that we didn't settle on the first one that we fell in love with. 

Just as important as a stellar Logo and Icon is the Channel Header. It is what welcomes people to your corner of YouTube. We also had our Designer make one of those up:

Though initially hesitant with the skull, it grew on me. I gave back the notes that I wanted to shrink "with Adam James" and add "In Other News" somewhere on the header. It is not shown anywhere else. Then I saw another issue on the mobile platform:

With this, I also requested that everything get swapped to the skull would be behind the Channel ICON on Mobile. This is the final header we ended up with: