Floors and Ceilings

Concept is taken from Magic: the Gathering material like the concept of honers and innovators. I read about these two concepts in an article by Magic: the Gathering pro Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, and I have no idea what the article was named or where it is. Anyways...

Similar to the names "honers" and "innovators", the names "floors" and "ceilings" bear a lot of intuitive value, though they're less literal than the terms "honers" and "innovators" are. In a more abstract sense, something's floor is its lower bound. Something's ceiling is its upper bound. How I'm going to relate to this Halo montages is applying the terms to a montage's overall quality and using this level of abstraction to better explain how to make a Halo montage for YouTube.

Similar to the rest of the internet essentially, the YouTube community tends to focus more on the negative than the positive. From my experience reading comments on YouTube, this effect is amplified on my channels. What this means when it comes to floors and ceilings is that you want to the floor of your montage to be average at the very least. This can be tricky for people who want to make content that stands out, because a lot of the time, the content from these people have a low floor (from failed innovating) but a high ceiling (from successful innovating). The easiest route is to make a video with a high floor but a low ceiling relative to the floor (ceiling's pretty much the same as the floor). This leads to a consistent video that never disappoints but never stuns either.

Given the immense volume of how much Halo content comes out regularly, you are (obviously) going to need a high ceiling in order to gain any sort of widespread recognition. Unless you're simply amazing, making a video with both a high floor and a high ceiling is hard. However, if you try to make the entire video innovative, there's a good chance that you will have a lot of portions that simply don't work, resulting in a low floor. If you're burdened with the task of ranking your innovative footage (all your trick jumps for instance), you should take out the ones that you have doubts about (only keeping the best ones to ensure a high ceiling) and replace them with something safe to ensure an average floor at the very least (some generic multikills or something). Applying this same concept, if you can ensure an average floor, go for the highest possible ceiling because if there aren't any bad clips to sour a viewer's experience of your video, then only the gems (the ceiling) are left to establish your video's presence in memory. In the fringe case that you can have either an average floor and a high ceiling or an above average floor and an average above ceiling, go for the former. For example, an MLG montage that's 50/50 overkills/killtrocities is better than one that's entirely killtaculars.

Anyways, that is all that I have to say about this fairly simple concept. Thanks for reading and take care.