aLIVE and Singin’

Cody Flores
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

Here’s the thing. I’ve always been known as the makulit. That’s why my friends thought that it would be a total breeze for me to conduct my Facebook Live. To be honest, because they had such great confidence in me, I was starting to believe them. But really, I was just confronted with a bunch of “Now what?” moments.

Yesterday, for my PUBLISH class (of course), we were required to go live on Facebook for 30 minutes. This 30 minutes must consist of a guest and an interview with them. With that, we were to build an audience and find ways to make the interview interesting enough to get that audience to stay — to interact and maybe even want to share it.

First thing’s first: I AM SO BAD AT INTERVIEWS. I love talking, yes. But i find the skill of directing a conversation to a certain path through an exchange of questions from me and answers from them is just exactly that; a skill. A skill I don’t have. Plus, with limited time and resources, who am I supposed to interview? And what were we supposed to talk about? And who would even care? This is exactly what we learn in class, though, so I had some idea of a formula in mind. But okay, let’s say I had the formula… I was still a bit terrified. What if nobody cared?

Anyways, I wanted to get a feel of the whole experience so I joined my friends Selene, Jayme and Chiara with their FB Live experiences to see if I could handle it all. Here’s what I learned: it’s pretty exhausting! For some reason, once the camera was on, I was EXTRA loud and I was EXTRA makulit. Who wouldn’t be exhausted?

Fast forward to my Facebook live. Keeping the formula in mind I was able to somehow establish what I wanted to do, and how I wanted it to happen. To be sure that I would have some degree of an audience, I played it safe. When I asked my self who would care about what I had to say, a group of people stood out: MY RELATIVES. That being said, I joined my sister into my party of 1 and finally decided that my Facebook Live would be 30 minutes of just singing songs and answering questions from our commenters. Why singing? Because all of my friends and family know I love to sing so at least I’m being myself. Mix my love for singing with my being makulit and I think I have a recipe for a jam-packed 30 minute live experience. And for the interview… due to the lack of exciting things happening in her life, I thought it would be a great idea to conduct the interview through a game of would you rather. To get people to stay, we went back and forth from the questions and the singing. I found that my audience really enjoyed this.

Overall, I found that the experience was a great way to create something that people might care about. It was also an exercise of selling yourself, what you can say, what your interviewee can say, and how all of this could get people to stay. Facebook live is quite different from my normal productions because there’s no room for editing or for mistakes or for getting past the dead air and the awkward unplanned moments. I was glad to see that a lot of people came to watch even though I started mine really late at night, and how my Facebook friends whom I have never even spoken to in real life came to listen to me and my sister jam.

Everything we did in those 30 minutes was completely random and real, and I guess, at the end of the day, that’s what the internet and its audience is big on. Viral videos nowadays are consisted of animal videos OR the most random and funniet moments caught on camera. Most of these videos are filmed on a smart phone, making it all feel so real and relatable. I guess that’s one reason why my Facebook live experience was pretty successful. Honestly, I could see myself possible doing this again.

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