Brainstorming

• Architect your virtual environment from scratch with me
• TasteDive
• Letterboxd
• Yahoo Answers

Why track media

• List benefits of having a media tracker
• Shows and Movies
• Evolution of my media tracker
• Tracking time
• How you’d incorporate other media

How to track media

• Information architecture
• Whiteboard to illustrate the system (how everything fits together)
• What if there was a search engine within shows; similar to Retro’s power of retrocognition

Consider a separate “diy bingo cards | craft with me” video

Inspiration

• True crime/profile (m)documentaries
• Kimmy Schmidt mockumentary
• Poltergeist movie poster
• Thumbnail: me in front of tv; hypnotised
• The Amanda Show in bed
• Cozy DIY with me

Hook

Value Prop

What this video is about

Why you should watch till the end

So I just checked my personal media tracker I made in Notion, and apparently last year I watched 84,854 minutes worth of tv. So stick around and I’ll give you the grand tour of how I use Notion keep track of my pathological media consumption and the strategies that I’ve used to completely transform the way I watch tv from a passive activity into a creative one!

Types of TV People

Do you watch tv? If not, <gasp>. If yes, what type of tv watcher are you? Because, from what I can tell, there are a bunch of different ways to watch tv.

First and foremost, we’ve got the most obvious distinction: the people who do watch tv vs the people who don’t.

Then we’ve got the old school channel flippers, who need to evaluate all of their options before landing on a final decision. Vs the satisficers, who stick with the first thing that looks interesting to them.

We’ve also got the ignorers vs the carers. Where the ignorers don’t care much about what’s actually going on, they just want some background noise, whereas the carers wouldn’t feel comfortable missing a single scene.

There are the listeners, who like to multitask with other things while paying attention to the plot. Vs. the seers who prefer to focus all of their attention on the show in front of them.

We’ve got the rewatchers, who frequently revisit their old favs. Vs the single users, who keep their eyes facing forward and never look back.

There are the committers vs the ditchers. Where the committers like to hold out hope that the thing their watching will get better by the end and where the ditchers don’t hesitate to abandon a show that fails to impress quickly enough.

Then there are the vocalisers, who love to spark up conversations about and with the tv. Vs the silencers, who prefer to tune out the world around them.

And finally, we’ve got the trackers vs the slackers. Where trackers are the savvy people who record things like what movies and shows they’ve seen and slackers are the ones who realise that they’ve already seen the movie that they’re currently half way through accidentally rewatching.

As for me, I’d say I’m a tv watching channel flipping, caring, yet multitasking rewatcher, who ditches and vocalises. But most importantly of all, I’m a dedicated tracker.

Introduction

I began tracking my media consumption back in 2018. It started off as a simple record of which shows and movies I watched each day. Until eventually, I wanted to know how that translated into the amount of time I spent watching them. So I started tallying up their durations and adding them up at the end of each year. Then, I also considered that I spend a lot of time on YouTube, so I also started taking note of how many YouTube videos I watched each day. Overtime, it turned from a simple curiosity about my media consumption into a way to become an active participant in my viewing experience.

Having a media tracker is great for learning some basic stats about our media consumption habits and for keeping track of what we’ve watched. But if we think a little more creatively, it can also come with the added benefit of finding fun and useful ways to engage with the movies and shows that we watch. And it can even offer us an opportunity to learn somethings about ourselves. So if you’re a tracker like me looking to put your data collections to use or if you’re just someone who wants to start tracking and playing with strategies to augment your viewing habits, then I’ve got a list of 30 creative ways to watch tv that’ll hopefully help spark some inspiration for you too. So let’s explore those together, all while building ourselves our own mini media tracker!

Tour Setup

So, let’s start with a little bit of initial setup. My platform of choice is Notion, so that’s where I’ll be creating my tracker.

Create page → Add title → Pick emoji → Create table database

If you’ve ever tried your hand at a media tracker before, then chances are you started with the most obvious dimension: the title of what you watched.

I prefer to have two separate tables: one for tv and one for movies. And to make them look a little less sad, I’ll populate them with the last 10 movies and last 10 shows that I watched. And I’ll also go ahead and accessorise them by copying their promotional posters from google and pasting it into their pages. That way we can switch into a gallery view and enjoy some vibrancy. And great! Now we have a nice basic media tracker!

Now that we’ve set the stage, lets snack on a box of creative cookies and put our tracker to use!

Affinity Spectrum

Creative cookie #1: Affinity spectrum. Starting off with a pretty obvious update here and all it involves is tacking on a rating system, in order to keep track which of our finds that we’ve enjoyed the most.

It might be helpful at this point to take some time to consider a grading schema that resonates with you. I like to rate things on a four tier system: not for me, not bad, excellent, and love it. And what I like about these tiers, as opposed to something like a rating out of 10, is that they prevent us from wasting time thinking about degrees of dislike. We pick a number that defines Not Bad, for me that’s 7. Anything before 7 becomes a Not for me. That means that we can focus on asking ourselves how much we enjoyed something, rather than how much we disliked it.

Vibe Check

Creative Cookie #2: Vibe Check. Imagine: it’s late September, the air is crisp, and the Falloween ambiance is starting to take effect. You want to prime yourself for the change in season by getting into a nice cozy mindset with the perfect thing to watch. You probably have a few go-to titles stored in your mind: binge a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer, throwback to Halloweentown, indulge in the autumnal aesthetic of the Gilmore Girls theme song. But maybe just this once you want to switch things up a bit. You know you’ve seen several titles that would totally fit the vibe, but aw shucks, you just can’t remember what they were. Thankfully, that’s where Vibe Check comes in. It’s pretty much our media tracker’s way of DIYing the “search by genre” and “search in collection” features that most streaming platforms take advantage of.

So for this one all we’ve got to do is add a new multi-select field for tags/genres. Now we can populate the options we want to see, so I’ll go ahead and add some genres, subgenres, and collections. And distinguish those three categories by colour. Now that we have that we can take advantage of Notion’s views by picking out the options that resonate with us the most and highlighting those titles in separate gallery views like so.

Objective insights

Creative Cookie #3: Objective insights. What would you say if I was to ask you who your favourite actors are? Any idea how you came to that conclusion? When I asked myself that question, I started to question all of the other potential factors that might bias my answer: are certain actors more salient in my mind, not necessarily because they were my favourite, but because their name was mentioned in the media a few times recently. Or because I happened to really enjoy one of their movies recently. Or because they were great in a movie within a genre I rarely watch, so that single instance stands out. Or they just happen to be in the most movies I’ve watched, but not necessarily the ones with a blue or green rating.

Objective insights is our way of testing out the assumptions we have about our media preferences by adding a little data-driven validation. Thanks to the ratings we gave our titles in the previous task we can now play with questions like which actors appear the most in my favourite titles? Which studios produce most of my favourite titles? And depending on your opinion about how quantity equates to degree of affinity, we could use this data to objectively uncover who our true favourite actors are for example.

So for this one what we’re going to do is create a page with a new table to store a list of actors we notice show up in a lot of our favourite titles. We can add a pizzazz by copying and pasting in some headshots from Google, so that we can turn this into a gallery later. Create relation with movie and show tables → add equation → sort.

If you wanted to level up this table even further, you could even transform it from an Actor’s table into a Cast and Crew table, where you could add names of directors, filmmakers, writers… and distinguish them using a Role tag.

Theme song mementos

https://www.artofthetitle.com/

Creative Cookie #4: Theme song mementos. [Courage the Cowardly Dog intro — “we interrupt this program to bring you…] Theme Song Shazam! I love a good theme song and title sequence. And I especially love when they have the ability to time travel me back to when I first watched something. But before we get into building nostalgia into our trackers, let’s play a quick game. I’m going to play 10 two second audio clips from theme songs from my childhood and see if you can guess which show they’re from. [game]. So how’d you do?? And more importantly, if you did recognise any of them, did you feel any sense of nostalgia revisiting some songs from your past?

For this exercise, we’re going to add a new checkmark dimension to our tables in order to identify the shows and movies with our favourite title sequences. Then we’re going to go through them and check off the ones that house our favs. Then we can create a page with a linked database to our shows and our movies tables and filter in the titles we’ve just added checkmarks to. Now we have a nostalgic time capsule of all of our favourite theme songs and title sequences. And a bonus tip for those of us who appreciate creative title sequences is to check out the side Art of the the Title.

Award Ceremony

Creative Cookie #5: Award Ceremony. I was a big fan of the Oscars growing up. I always thought that the ceremonies were extravagant and beautiful to watch. I loved using it as a chance to appreciate creative aspects of filmmaking that I often overlooked. It often reminded me about all of the expertise and skills that come together seamlessly into creating a feature: the costume and set designers, the voice actors who broaden the geography of enjoyment, the foley artists who develop hilarious and ingenious ways of creating sound effects. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve veered away from award show ceremonies, largely in part because they don’t tend to showcase a lot of the genres that I enjoy the most. So this exercise is based off of the idea that if people more often shared lists of their favourite things then they could be the source of discoverability for people who have similar tastes.

For this exercise, the goal is to become the source of new title discoveries for people with similar tastes to yours. Create a new Awards Page → add some award categories that are meaningful to you → activate the built in Created At dimension in your movie and show trackers → at the end of each month, sort by date and filter by greens and blues → add your favourite titles to a list of nominees to specific categories in your Awards page → at the end of the year select your winners for each category → finally, share your results.

Value Discovery

Creative Cookie #6: Value discovery. Figuring out our values is said to be a great north star for guiding our major life and minor day-to-day decisions. One often used strategy for figuring out one’s strategy is to peruse a long list of words like connection, success, and joy, and highlight the ones that appear to resonate with you. I’m proposing using tv as an alternate strategy. And it’s one that I’ve used to help uncover my own personal values & anti-values. All we’ve got to do is go through our catalog of favourite shows and identify characters we admire the most. Then go through that list of your favourite characters and try to identify the trait that you admire the most about it.

Role models Mantras

Creative Cookie #7: Role model mantras. It’s one of my favourite approaches to affirmations. I've never really found a mantra that I felt comfortable using, but I like the idea of self-conditioning a simple stimulus to trigger self-confidence at any given moment. So I decided to try out a new strategy that relies on my wish to be more like some of my favourite tv show characters... Just for today... • I will be as worry-free as Frankie Bergstein • I will remain as composed as Alicia Florrick • I will be as bold as Madam Secretary • I will be as self-assured as Jane Bingum • I will carry out my mission as well La Femme Nikita.

Capture habits

Creative Cookie #8: Capture Habits. What if we could remember everything we ever watched? I think about all of the random tidbits of information from the shows I’ve seen that I’ve been able to sponge up over the years. Like how the first episode of House featured neurocycticercosis or the script and theme song lyrics of certain intros.

I’ve seen so many medical, legal, and spy shows and can’t help but wonder how many skills, strategies, and expertise could I have access to if I paid more attention. What if we were like Chuck Bartowski and tv was our intersect? We could watch, absorb, and recall info at a moment’s notice.

The point of this creative cookie is to improve our capture habit abilities by figuring out a strategy to record useful stuff we learn from shows and movies. For me, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube on my tv lately and I started taking out my phone and video recording clips I’d like to remember. It’s been a really handy way of fulfilling my goal of building out stronger capture habits. At the end of each week, I go through my recordings and try to find an appropriate spot for them in my second brain.

Sparks

Creative Cookie #9: Sparks. Similar to the previous exercise where the goal was to improve our capture habits, the goal of this exercise is to ensure that we actually take advantage of our notes. I like to maintain a sparks log, where the goal is to record all of the things that spark my inspiration and motivation each day.

It used to happen where I’d go through occasional periods of ennui where I'd feel as through I'd exhausted the list of interests that I wanted to explore. I've come to realise that the problem wasn't that I'd explored all of my interests, but that I just couldn't remember every topic that I wanted to explore. But now, because I’m constantly adding to my sparks list throughout the week, I always have a list of topics I’m eager to deep dive into.

My favourite spark examples

Content Catcher

Creative Cookie #10: Content Catcher. For this exercise we’re taking our notes back into our media tracker. When it came to our sparks, there wasn’t necessarily a direct link between each note and the show they came from, for example xxx. But sometimes there is a direct connection. Say for example, that we come across a scene that is super meme-able, so we look it up and find that it exists, we can use our databases to store title specific content within its pages.

So for this exercise lets head over to giphy → type in a couple of our favourite shows/movies → and copy them into their respective pages in our database. Now we’ve officially started our own personal meme reservoir. Another thing I like to do after I finish a show, is to type its title into YouTube to see if anyone’s made any interesting video on it. Same as we did with the memes, we can save our favourite videos into their respective pages.

Memory palaces

Creative Cookie #11: Memory Palaces. This exercise is the memory hack I once used to memorise over 200 quotes. The prospect of ageing into a wise old man who can inspire others with his illustrious words of wisdom was my initial motivation for memorising quotes. Since then, I've come to appreciate extra perks, like having on-demand reading material in my mind for when I'm trapped in boring situations. Whatever your motivation might be, my hope is to help you conceptualise a fun way to absorb and organise a large number of quotes in your mind.

The strategy that I use to memorize quotes is built off of the Memory Palace technique, where you take an environment that you're familiar with and recreate it in your imagination, so that you have a place to store the information that you want to memorize. A simple example of this could be using your house as a memory palace to remember a grocery list. On your list you've got five items: carrots, lettuce, parsley, oranges, and broccoli. (Quick question: why do you have the same tastes as my guinea pig 👀). Using the memory palace technique, you would create scenes around your house involving each of those ingredients. So, you could imagine that as you're walking through your front door you have to rummage through a forest of parsley, then as you enter your kitchen you notice your dad juggling a bunch of oranges, you make your way to your living room and your mom is playing darts with carrots. And you do this for the rest of your list. The idea is that you'll be a lot more likely to remember your grocery list if you can visualize walking through a bunch of crazy scenes in your mind.‍

I'm not sure if there's already a name for what I'm about to describe, but I like to call it my Memory Kingdom. If a memory palace is a single location used to memorize a single list, then a memory kingdom is several related locations used to memorize a collection of related lists. Let's take a look at a concrete example using how I memorize quotes.‍

I started out with a list of about 100 quotes, which I knew was going to grow over time. I wanted to create a memory storage and retrieval system, so that I could remember relevant quotes when needed. I figured that if I wanted to retrieve relevant quotes then I would need to organize my quotes thematically. So, I went through each quote and tagged it with a theme based on what it was about. For example, for the quote "To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart", I tagged it with "empathy" and "leadership". As of writing this, I have 81 themes in total. My goal was to have an individual memory palace for each theme and each memory palace would hold quotes tagged with that theme. I know that 81 memory palaces sounds pretty daunting. I mean, who is comfortably familiar with over 80 locations? I'll tell you who, people who watch TV! I realized that there are shows that I have become so comfortable with that I could easily close my eyes and imagine walking through sets and scenes. In the end, I was able to associate each of my 81 themes with a television show. So now, there are 81 quote containing Quotation Castles (TV shows) in my Quotation Kingdom.‍

Pre-personality quiz

Which character are you?

Creative Cookie #12: Pre-Personality Quiz. A much easier task than the last one, for this exercise all we’ve gotta do is take one of those “Which character are you?” tests before we watch the show or movie we’re about to see. I first tested this out before watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. And it turned out to be a fun lens accessory with which to watch the show.

Bingo

Consider a separate “diy bingo cards | craft with me” video

Offer a template

Creative Cookie #13: Bingo. You ever watch a movie with an annoyingly perceptive person with an uncanny ability to predict everything that’s going to happen? Well for this one we’re going to make a game out of it can be played with others or by yourself.

Have each person write down a list of 9 predictions for the title your about to watch. Then have each person draw up a grid with 9 squares. Label each square with a number from 1 to 9. As you watch your title, highlight each prediction that you got right. The first person to get a straight line of correct answers wins! If you think you might want to give it a try, checkout my next video where we’ll craft up some bingo cards together with a bunch of genre categorised starter predictions.

Imagination games

Creative Cookie #14: Imagination games.

TV/Movie inner teleportation

Aesthetic Inspiration

Creative Cookie #15: Aesthetic inspiration.

Outfits

Hairstyles

Soundtrack Inspiration

Creative Cookie #16: Soundtrack inspiration. I wonder how strong the correlation is between our favourite movies and the type of music that we like. Movies select songs for their soundtrack in order to create an atmosphere and if it’s a fav movie of ours then we probably resonate with that atmosphere.

So by doing a deep dive into the soundtracks of our fav titles, I wonder how many of our new favourite songs we could uncover. And I also think we can take advantage of those soundtracks to accessorise the atmosphere of our own lives.

This exercise works in two directions: First we’ve got the soundtrack search: look up your favourite shows and movies and try to find some new music you like based on their soundtracks. Second we’ve got the reverse soundtrack search: look up the shows and movies that use your favourite music in their soundtracks. One useful resource you might consider using is TuneFind.com.

Education Inspiration

Creative Cookie #17: Education Inspiration. I’d always had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do for my career. When I was 6 I’d made a list of my top 100 career paths. Overtime it developed into a curiosity about exploring the goings-on of different careers. I loved any opportunity to get an inside look into the lifestyles and worldview lenses that different careers afforded. And one of my favourite ways to get that behind the scenes look was by pretending I was shadowing characters with interesting careers. So while there’s no doubt that we get dramatised perceptions of what it takes to be a doctor or lawyer, paying attention to character careers could be a handy way to gauge and discover paths that you might be interested in.

Language learning

Creative Cookie #18: Language learning. I studied French from grade 4 through 12 and yet rewatching Desperate Housewives in French was one of the first times I felt like I was truly starting to grasp the language in a practical way. Watching shows and movies in languages that you want to learn can be a great way to immerse yourself.

Drawing

Creative Cookie #19: Drawing. Another way to use the shows we watch to our advantage can be if we want to learn to draw. Getting inspiration from the cartoons and anime can be a fun benchmark to use while in the imitation stage of our imitate, then innovate learning process.

Coding

Creative Cookie #20: Coding. Teaching myself to code has been one of my proudest accomplishments and I attribute a lot of my success to the inspiration I was able to garner from shows and movies. Our media tracker can serve as a treasure trove of project inspiration and it’s one of my first go to spots when I’m thinking about how to approach any new project I’m working on. When I started to learn to code my specific areas of interest were linguistics and data science/analysis and I used my media reservoir to guide my portfolio project topics. Three examples of project ideas I explored were:

1. Big Brother UK Eviction Predictor Using Sentiment Analysis With A Real Time Graphical Interface:

Big Brother UK is a reality game show where people are recruited to spend an extended period of time in a house together. Though it may sound like a simple task, big personalities have a habit of erupting and creating some really entertaining TV.

Each week, at least one of the housemates is evicted by a public vote and I created a sentiment analyzer, using a Naive Bayes classifier, to classify incoming tweets, using Twitter's Streaming API, about a housemate as either positive or negative, with the hope of predicting which one of them is most likely to leave. I also used bokeh (a python interactive visualization library) to create a real time graphical interface which updates routinely, in order to easily distinguish the contestants least favoured by the public.

2. A Gilmore Girls Pop Culture Reference Analysis Using Named Entity Recognition: Being that Gilmore Girls is renowned for its clever use of pop culture references and that it is one of my favourite shows I, of course, decided to use a named-entity recognizer (NER) to analyze how some of the main characters used references. NER is a program that extracts elements in text that are considered to be names of things (i.e., people, companies and places).
3. Spellbook: a virtual reservoir and search engine for magical spells from some of the most popular shows with witches.

Outro

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