2 posts tagged “youtube”

    YouTube fascinates me. It really does. It is quite possibly one of the most innovative websites to come along in the last few years, and it's completely revolutionized personal and viral videos on the Internet. It's not unusual these days to see your friends and co-workers on the site, whether as avid watchers with hundreds of favorites or vloggers who pour their hearts out to virtual audiences via webcam. Either way, YouTube and its clones have become major outlets for artists and advertisers alike.
    Lately, I've been trying to think of distribution and using YouTube as a means to seriously get TBM 'out there', so-to-speak. Obviously we've already got a page on the site and we've posted the films we've made so far, but we've yet to sit down and seriously focus on a way to use YouTube as a means of promotion. And when I say that I mean looking at how people find our films, checking demographics and hit counts, toying with things like tags and length in order to maximize our audience, etc. Hell, even focusing on specific content geared towards certain established audiences; I'd love to do a series on deconstructing YouTube "celebrities" who don't deserve the title, even if it's the audience that puts them on a pedestal.

    From what I've seen, YouTube can be a great outlet for creativity, but not in the same ways that traditional distribution works for lengthy narrative films. Take our 15-minute short from 2006, Delivery. Despite being what I feel is one of our best shorts thus far, it's got the least amount of views out of all of the films we've posted on YouTube. In fact, our most viewed film happens to not only be our shortest, but quite possibly our worst! I don't want to say it doesn't make sense to me, because it actually does make a lot of sense: the majority of the viewers on YouTube prefer shorter, easier to digest videos that have an average length of two minutes or so, with the exceptions being if the videos are produced by a specific user who holds some kind of popularity on the site (i.e. HappySlip, ArtieTSMITW). So how exactly do you gain this sort of Internet fame?
    Well, there's probably no 100% fool-proof way to get popular on YouTube, but from what I've seen and read, there are a number of little tips and tricks that I'm itching to try out:

1. Produce short, episodic content that is generally appealing. As my friend King was telling me the other week when we were brainstorming ideas for a short film, if you want to reach the biggest audience possible you need to produce something that people can really relate to, and that makes them feel good. It's hard, given that a lot of the stories I like to tell deal with darker, more emotionally challenging issues, but I'm willing to start thinking outside the box. The episodic content is fairly crucial too, because it generates some buzz over time that keeps users coming back to your channel for more.

2. Create a persona. Some of the best YouTubers tend to use the vlog form as a way to construct a personality that others find interesting. Personally I never found the whole webcam video form that appealing, but if done right it can be just as engaging as a narrative character study, and more real than 'reality' TV. If you or someone who know has an outgoing, striking personality (good looks help as well), put them in front of the camera. Doesn't matter if they can't act.

3. Make an attempt at originality. No one likes a copycat, so try not to follow in the tracks of other, more popular users. Sure, movie re-enactments are fun to do, but don't bank on that idea alone less you want to be compared to ArtieTSMITW. Instead, think of something that hasn't been done before, or at least delve into a topic that - while still appealing - doesn't seem to have a whole lot of coverage on YouTube. Combine genres and forms in a way that's unique. It's a helluva lot easier to gain noteriety when it's your own brainchild.

4. Learn to take criticism and other comments with a grain of salt. Although not as bad as some viral video sites like Break, many users on YouTube tend to leave horrible comments which contain - but are not limited to - blatant racism/sexism, ignorance, bias, unprovoked insults, flamebait, etc. On one hand you might be tempted to fight back, spending an hour or so typing up responses left and right, but just learn to let it go. Take everything with a grain of salt and soon your own peers and fans will start fighting for you, marking stupid comments as bad remarks or spam so you don't have to.

5. Know your audience. Start keeping track of the types of people who watch your videos. With YouTube's new Insight feature it's easy to tell who's been watching, and there's all sorts of neat little demographical information you can get. Learn to manipulate your tags and other things to target the audience you want. I'm sure this will come in handy at some point.

    I want to try and work more with the site in the near future. I've got some ideas in the works that will put some of my theories to the test. See you on YouTube.

     The first time I made a film was in high school. I remember my friends and I heading over to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with a camcorder, and when we got there we made our friend Gordon take his shirt off and cover himself in ketchup to simulate blood. Of course, without his shirt on he wouldn't lie down on the dirty gravel, so he kind of hunched next to the wall of a tunnel while another of our friends investigated the bloody "corpse". All of a sudden - boom! - Gordon starts moaning like something out of Romero's Night of the Living Dead and slowly ambling forward while our other friend pops off five or six rounds from a cheap toy gun that doesn't actually shoot anything. We didn't want to shoot anymore since we didn't have a script, an idea of where to go, and Gordon wanted to wash up. We never picked up the film after that.
    Senior year I had to make more films for my AP English class. The only one I remember really putting any effort into was a crappy rendition of Shakespeare's Othello, but since my group comprised of me and two of my Chinese friends, we changed the story around so that Othello was white (which I looked and identified more with in high school, despite being half Chinese) and living in a world made up of Chinese. The work was grueling and long, but we wound up finishing up the project thanks to my friend Derek. We dubbed the finished work O², after the other Othello film with Josh Hartnett, Mekhi Phifer and Julia Stiles. Unfortunately we still got a B on it, despite it being "epic" in our eyes.
    Fast-forward to fall of my Freshman year of college, and I'm asked to make a film for my Core course. At that point in time I didn't have a camcorder of my own, and none of my close friends had one that I could use for my project, so I wound up shooting the film - a short interview with my dad regarding his immigration to the United States - in thirty-second intervals using my digital camera. My classmates liked my film, as did my professor and TA. They said it had a very "cinematic" quality to it. I think it was at that point that I realized that I liked making films. By the following spring my parents bought me a camcorder and my friends and I - the two I had worked on O² with, Derek, and another friend who went to UCSC with me - formed a production group under the named JAWED Productions; the name was derived from our first names (Jeff, Austin, Will, Edmond, Derek).

   Of course, we never actually completed a film under that name. Our first real film, PWNED!! (2005), was done under the modified name "MAWD" since my then-girlfriend thought it was "unfair" to use a name when not everyone was represented (yeah, whatever). We shot the film in my dorm room as well as the laundry room and dining hall of my residential college, finishing everything including an all-nighter for editing in about four days. We submitted it to an on-campus student film festival and got a great reception by all of our friends who attended, later getting even more praise for the film by our friends online after putting it up on YouTube.
   It was then that we decided to take our filmmaking to yet another level. At the time I decided that I wanted to study film as a medium, so I made the decision to double-major in Film & Digital Media as well as Literature, which was what I was currently majoring in (although I had planned to do Creative Writing, which is a concentration of Lit for some reason). We changed the name of our production group to something more fitting, something we all understood, loved, and instantly clicked with - The Breakfast Machine.
   Since then we've made a number of short films and been in a couple of film festivals. Hell, we won a viewer's choice award last year at another UCSC film festival. By now we've gotten fairly good at the technique of filmmaking despite the lack of equipment and personnel to work with. Every film we make is another step forward, and even though we generally only churn out one "solid" film a year those films wind up being huge strides for us in terms of production. From PWNED!! we moved on to a 20-minute neo-noir, Delivery (2006), which was radically different than anything we had done; and after that we pulled off the experimental action/thriller HK (2007). Now we're working on a number of other projects, including a film I've been working on since last year, Purgatory.

   This past summer marked our two-year anniversary as The Breakfast Machine, and as we moved into our Senior year of college I started to look back at what we've done and reflect on what sort of things I actually want to do with film. When doing the rewrite for the Purgatory script I started to jot down what sort of themes and tropes I wanted to deal with in my films, what kinds of aesthetics I'd like to employ in telling my stories, and what defined my style and philosophy of filmmaking. Naturally, very little of what I wrote down has made it to any of our films, because my ideas tend to be long, drawn out, epic you might say. Beyond our current fiscal reach. But I'm starting to get to a point where I can work with what we've got.
   Filmmaking is definitely something I like to do, and I definitely want to keep on doing it. In many ways I'm glad I'm not part of the production concentration here at UCSC, because I hate to be restricted and confined to doing certain things. I love having the freedom to express myself in whatever way I want. I only hope I'll be able to keep on doing just that even after college.

   I realize that this post is long enough as it is, but it's only the first part of what I want to write about when it comes to making films. Next time I'll write more about those aesthetics and themes I talked about in the above paragraphs. For now I'll be content with the history portion, because if there's anything I learned from taking film classes here, it's that the historical context has just as much weight as the theoretical images within a film.