Youtube

One of my fondest memories as a child was creating movies / films. There's something magical about playing pretend, putting on a play, and combining this with capturing the moment on film.

I don't know if I decided to stop being cheap, or if our parents finally gave in, but at some point my brother Sam and I had our personal camcorder, and it didn't take long before we were uploading videos on Youtube.  Now that the camera was ours we could film as frequently as we wanted.

Youtube provided the potential to make an income without having to adhere to labor laws. Of course, we were never close to the level of receiving sponsorships, but it was one aspect that we chased for a while.

The focal point of Youtube in the early days seemed to be make people laugh, and we tried to take part of that in a variety of ways. Our videos included:

• music videos
• sketch comedy
• recreating other videos
• random videos
• fake vlogging
• real vlogging

The sketch comedy ranged from retrieving a magic marker, to a homeless person picking up a bomb from a terrorist by accident, to a nerd being robbed of their calculator and deciding to kill the two bullies who robbed him. There was also a 9 part vlog series of a fictional character who was minimally eccentric, but at worst had learning disabilities.

Even though the majority of videos are unlisted there is something wonderful about having this sort of time capsule at least for ourselves.

One of the hardest tasks of making Youtube videos was managing creative differences between Sam and I. My outlook was very much that we had a brand to manage, and therefore we should be very careful about the type of content we uploaded. In this view I was also a dictator. As an older brother I had more say even though the Youtube channel was managed jointly. To make matters worse, Sam did the majority of the work on the editing side.

In addition to chasing money we were chasing fame, or localized fame. To try and explain this there was a fear that our friends would get tired of seeing certain things, or if we released bad videos they would no longer want to watch our videos we also wanted our whole middle school or high school to watch our videos.

Even though we did want an audience trying to appease too much to an audience created too much pressure, and sucked the fun out of a lot of things. Initially going into a scene my goal would be to make the other person laugh / break as much as possible. This doesn't guarnatee a good scene, it doesn't guarnatee a funny scene either.  However, it does mean we had fun doing it. Later down the road I would feel more uncomfortable with a camera in my face.  I felt uncomforterable performing and I worried that we would be perceived poorly. To this day I feel a level of discomfort around acting on film, not that I've done it in a long time.

In addition to policing what we could and couldn't do everything ended up feeling more like work, and not like fun. In hindsight looking at the videos Sam was making he was ahead of his time.  I can't speak to his rationale, maybe because I was too stubborn to engage on alternative approaches. In fact the rifts were big enough that Sam ended up creating his own channel.

I don't know if Sam was more carefree, thought more highly of his ideas, was less rigid about having more free form and varied content or what it was. In any case had we taken his approaches we would've benefited in a lot of ways.  For one quantity leads to quality, the more you do something the better you are going to get at it. In my case I was inflciting us to paralysis by analysis.  In some ways I was also worried that we would squander good ideas if we werent' ready.

Second you don't know what is going to succeeded or what people are going to like so you might as well make a lot of things.

This one is more abstract, but it relates to squnadering your own ideas, you should become so prolific you don't recognize yourself. If you don't know what content is yours anymore you can evaluate it the same way you evaluate anything else.

There is nuance here that I don't quite know how to pinpoint.  It's something about the relationship between fun, and hard work. Sometimes people view having fun as messing around and they view that not as hard work. On the other hand you might view working hard as being serious and focused and maybe by extension not fun. These ideas can be applied to anything.

Concretely I can play 2 minute games of Chess where I barely think, or I can play 15 minute games where in theory I should take more time to make the moves.  One doesn't have to be inherently more fun than the other, but the pressure of needing to get better could suck the fun out of it.  However, getting better at something can make it more enjoyable as well, because you can appreciate that there is more depth to what you are doing and you can engage with the task in different ways.  There's also a joy to being good at something, and a joy to improving at something, but by the same token there's often frustration from not improving at something over an extended period of time.

I try not to do drafts of what I write here, because I have less experience with that, maybe I think too highly of what I am saying or I don't want to deliberate over what is good to keep and what isn't.  This problem also surfaced in Youtube videos, we understood that shorter is better but always struggled to condense. You probably don't have to pick between fun and hard work, but if I did have to pick I would choose fun because I belive that fun means you'll engage with the task for more. Probably something worth revisitng later ;)!