I've Never Been to Me
[Essay]
What Goes into a Digital Short
The digital short has untapped potential as a teaching tool. Although we primarily look at short videos—for instance, those posted to Facebook or Instagram Reels or TikTok—through a commercial lens with attention toward monetizing and gaming the algorithm, the videos also have value as an art form, hobby, and teaching tool. With the creeping takeover of AI, the digital short is a place to affirm the human in human endeavors, the art in art for art's sake, and the joy in human creation.
For this Performance Wunderkammer entry, I focus on a recent TikTok / Facebook Reel that I posted on November 18, 2025. I am a regular contributor to these platforms. I post something to TikTok every day—often very short, under-a-minute content—but I am particularly proud of this video. In it, I use a puppet to perform a cover of “I've Never Been to Me,” a 1982 pop song by Charlene. By elucidating in this essay the labor that went into the video's creation, I will draw attention to the skills that can be gained and honed through the creation of such a work. Even though my recording of “I've Never Been to Me” is not what we might consider a masterpiece, it is the result of toil, both performative and mental. Since I intend to argue for the pedagogical value of the creation of such short films, I organize my analysis by particular skills. Those skills are analytic, performance, visual art, and technological.
Analytic Skills
The first part of analysis is the selection of which text to perform. As part of my regular viewing (scrolling), I saw a TikTok list of “forgotten” one-hit wonders, including “I've Never Been to Me.” While I had no specific recollection of this song before TikTok, I believe that I had an unacknowledged acquaintance with it. It seemed familiar to me. It was a minor hit in the United States, but was much bigger in Canada. Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., 45 minutes by lake from Toronto, I was heavily influenced by Canadian taste in my youth. Since I would have been five years old when the song gained fame, it is plausible that I had heard the song before and that it resonated with my subconscious.
My many years of living—48, which is many more than the average TikTokker—helped me identify this song as worthy of attention. It has several traits that I appreciate. First, it has a verse-chorus pattern that builds in intensity: each time the singer says, “I've been to…,” we know we're in for something good. Second, it is a dramatic monologue: a defined-character speaker addresses a defined-character audience. A world-weary older woman singles out another woman in what is apparently a public space and warns her not to make the same mistakes that she has made.
The song is decidedly campy. The speaker reveals too much and speaks too frankly about sexuality, much like the professor characters that Rachel Dratch and Will Ferrell played on Saturday Night Live, who tell strangers about their lovemaking. The song also contains a spoken-word monologue before the final chorus, reminiscent of Lois Lane's melodramatic voiceover in the movie Superman. Because of the camp potential, I was drawn to the piece and thought that others might enjoy it as well.
Part of the camp arises from the values espoused. The speaker seems anti-feminist. For instance, she says that “truth” is “little baby” that the addressee is holding and that truth is “the man you fought with this morning, the same one you're going to make love to tonight.” She goes onto say that she has “been to crying for unborn children that might have made [her] complete” and she dismisses her past as “subtle whoring.” She seems to suggest that she “has never been to me” because she is not a wife and mother. Not only is the message anti-feminist, but it is also over-the-top. I have seldom seen traditional family values packaged in a way that seems so sleazy. However, to make sure that my audience understands how I appreciate the song—subtly laughing instead of concurring—I needed to come up with a performance device that would ensure that the audience knew my position. I felt that I had to dramatize the addressee, the woman spoken to. I felt that I had to show her perspective to dramatize how I as artist was reacting to the speech. I will delve further into my resultant performance strategies further down. But it suffices to say that I used the analytic skills that I learned in graduate school and that I teach in classes like play analysis and oral interpretation. They have to do with subtle interactions of text, performer, and audience—also of taste and belief.
Performance Skills
Prompted by my analysis, I needed to embody both speaker and addressee. However, digital shorts are a solo venture for me: I do not typically use other people. For this reason, I needed to play both parts myself. In my work, I typically use three types of performance methods—me (solo), puppets, or stop-motion animation. Because of the detail that I wanted from this performance, stop-motion was not an option, as I typically use action figures who can move but are limited in terms of facial expression and gesture. While some digital shorts creators will embody multiple parts through their own bodies—for instance, playing all four of the Golden Girls—I do not typically do this. Instead, I opted to use a puppet and myself. I chose to make the puppet the speaker since the speaker does not react; in fact, she just bulldozes her way through the monologue. Puppets are more expressive than action figures but less expressive than the human face. So I used the puppet as the speaker and myself as the more expressive party, the listener.
My puppetry skills come from years of experience, but no real training. My acting skills come from training; but I have always been more of a writer than an actor, so my skills remain limited. However, I think that I scaled the performance to fit my limitations. I believe that I am a strong singer; and, because of my low voice, I have a wide falsetto, which I have trained over the years. The high singing, then, while not vocally perfect, is pretty good for a middle-aged male. Instrumental music is probably my greatest weakness. I don't like to use pre-made backing tracks, so I often end up acapella. I did not feel that I could do this song acapella, though: because of the spoken-word monologue, I needed background music to underscore that section. Rather than use my piano—which I play poorly—I used one of the preset rhythms on my old Casio-style keyboard. The effect is dated but fitting with the 1980s, the era of the song.
Visual Arts Skills
I employed visual skills in the areas of set, puppet, and costume. For the background set, I chose my usual puppet set-up, which involves squatting next to my bed by a patch of green wall with nothing on it. The set is not exciting but not distracting. For the puppets, I used one of the pre-made puppets that I own. For this song, I had the choice among my blond woman puppet, my old lady puppet, or my ostrich puppet. I use my ostrich puppet most; and I picked her for the speaker/singer role. She is useful for roles that are a little bit out-of-the-ordinary. I dressed her up in a way that implied middle age, with a set of white Mardi Gras pearls and a blond dog wig that I bought so that my dog could look like Drew Barrymore in Scream for Halloween. As with the years of experience that I mention in the Analytic Skills section, my age means that I have acquired many items over the years that I can use.
The costume that I wore took more thought. I typically do not do drag for my online videos; however, for this film, I needed to play a female character. In selecting my costume, it was important keep attention on the song. In my mind, the song is the focus—the joke, if you will—and not any other element. I therefore wanted to avoid two pitfalls: placing attention on drag performance with corresponding expectations of the genre or employing comedy that arises solely from my being dressed as a woman. To address these concerns, I avoided many feminine markers, such as make-up, a wig, fake breasts, or a clean-shaven face. Instead, I adapted a costume design that I had used once before, when I played a character named Lady Agrathena in a “Baby Got Back” sketch. The costume involves a lot of draped fabric. It also involves a lorgnette that I fashioned from a coat hanger. The lorgnette allows for stage business focused on the act of looking—very appropriate for a character whose primary job is to react. There is an area that I could have improved: if I were a better performer, I would have attended more to the progress of my reactions and lorgnette use instead of repeating some business.
The song also requires that the addressee be holding a baby. I used an old Cabbage Patch Kid, wrapped in a blanket.
Technological Skills
All video shorts require technological components. For this video, since the characters would not be in frame at the same time, I needed two sets of recordings—one of the puppet singer and one of the human reactor. In practice, I used three recordings. First, I recorded just the song itself with keyboard backing. Once satisfied with that, I used it to record the other two videos. For the puppet recording, I played the song track on an iPad while I recorded with my phone. This allowed me to sync up the puppet movements with the song. For the reactor recording, I did the same thing—reacting to the song as it played.
I edited the video together using CapCut, a readily available software. I am moving to CapCut having typically used iMovie because CapCut allows for ease of editing in portrait orientation whereas iMovie forces landscape. I prefer landscape, but most digital shorts platforms prioritize portrait because most viewers watch on their phones. As I edited, I used the original recording of the song and put the appropriate clips over the top of that to ensure that audio quality was superior.
My film technique is simple. In this video, I really only have two camera angles, which is not best practice for film-making. But my technique was fine for the scope of this project, however, which is song and performance based. There are some issues with the editing—for example, miniature skips in the audio between some clips. I will improve my editing technique as I make more films on CapCut. I do almost nothing with lighting, which is unusual in digital shorts. I should probably buy and use a ring light one of these days.
The quality of the project should be judged as a whole. While certain elements exceeded others, I believe that my skillsets worked in harmony, acknowledging both my talents and my limitations to create something eminently watchable.
Closing
The purpose of listing and describing the techniques that went into the making of this simple video is to show the multitude of skills required and little tiny decisions that must be made in order to create a film, even of short length. As I point out, the video drew on my performance and technological experience, but also employed visual art skills and drew heavily on my expertise in literary analysis, without which the project could never have been conceived.
As AI becomes more prevalent in our lives, we are wise to look with appreciation to that which is human. This video, like many digital shorts, relies on a mélange of techniques, an assessment of available skills and resources, and the aesthetic element of discernment or taste to make the components cohere. By labeling and describing these skills and elucidating how they are used in video art, we gain an understanding of the value of human work in our artistic and hobby endeavors—even in endeavors that are typically seen as highly technological and commercialized. By encouraging projects like the one described here and by reframing digital shorts as amateur art done for pleasure, we practice our humanity—albeit briefly—in the daunting face of AI.
