MEDIHUB

New video: Google Presents 2023

Mar 15, 2023

Watch the video here.

According to my journal, the first piece of video that I finished making for this project was done on February 11. The script itself was started over winter break, so this video is anywhere from 1 to 3 months in the making depending on how lenient you are. Despite that, I don't know if I feel that it warranted that amount of time and effort. A lot of the footage and editing was shoddy, the audio mixing was obviously poor, and the acting from me saw little improvement from my unexpressive voiceovers in previous videos.

Some of that perspective is definitely due to the fact that I was the only person to be involved in this project, so everything in it has been seen by me a dozen times during filming and editing. Very few of the jokes that were in the video remained funny by the end. I wish the amount of work that I put into editing the video was more obviously apparent.

The thing that I hope people (including myself) can recognize from this video is this: I am capable of assembling large projects that require many different moving parts. You can't just make a video like this one overnight, or maybe even in a week (not by yourself, on a college schedule, at least). I think that proves that I'm at least focused and committed on making these projects.

That being said, I don't intend on working on a project like this for a while. The filming and prop-creating were neat ideas but ultimately I don't want to be making this type of video regularly. I want to scale back production to simpler formats and just hone in on improving in those simple forms. While quality is better than quantity for experienced creators, it's better to make a lot of small things in the creative field if you're trying to focus on improvement and variety.

Retrospective: A Year* of YouTube

Dec 28, 2022

*More like 9 months, but I suppose that means my YouTube channel's just been in the womb and is ready to be born soon. Actually, please don't think about that analogy.

I made seven (7) videos this year, and while that certainly isn't impressive to many people, it's a grand accomplishment for me. YouTube was always something I barely did and usually was just a way for me to relieve boredom during summer breaks or slow schoolyears. With this year, it feels like the tide has shifted. I certainly think that the quality of all of my videos varied this year, and while I'm not proud of all (or most) of them, I'm proud of the fact that they exist.

I only made public comments about one video previously, so I figured reminiscing about every "real" video I've made thus far would be a nice way to cap off the year and give birth to this page. Enjoy my very professional comments about my very professional videos:

• Nintendo Is The Most Iconic Video Game Company: The one that started it all. To give some context: we were given a multimedia project in our required English class, which required us to make some sort of argument using some sort of multimedia like an infographic, podcast, etc. Most people went with an infographic, a few people did a podcast, but I decided to be the stupid tryhard and make a video instead. The video took a week to make, but it was a hard week consisting of research, writing, recording audio and gameplay footage, editing, and putting together a final presentation for the project itself. I don't know how I got through that week, but by the end I did have a full video essay, as some may say. My "argument" was very simple on purpose, to make everything else easy. Of course, that still didn't help the large amount of editing I had to do to make the video look not-boring (as well as to include unncessary citations). It's a very safe and simple video, but ultimately that week-long burst helped implant the idea in my head that making okay videos was very possible.
• [YTP] Wow, Cup!: A fun day project that I made to try and get back into the video-making mindset. It's certainly not a premium YTP, but I liked a few of the jokes I made, and there was very little effort involved, so I'd say it was worth it.
• Minesweeper Is War: My first "real" video was a video essay, so I decided to try a spoof of the same genre. I believe it took about a couple days to make this video between writing, recording and editing. I can't hide that it probably is a bit Dunkey-esque in nature, but I tried to at least inject a bit of my own personality in there, although that may have hurt the video more than helped. A notable lesson I learnt is that I suck at recording audio. I was still too shy to raise my voice with my roommates in the apartment, and I struggled to understand how to make my mic sound better.
• The Untold Story of the Park Bench: Keeping up with the spoof trend from last video, I decided to make a fake documentary about park benches. It obviously pokes fun at generic American documentaries that you'd find on PBS or the History channel, but I don't quite have the voice or recording setup to properly voice act. This took the same amount of time as Minesweeper Is war, but I definitely think it's weaker due to less coherence throughout and the fact that it features an even more obscure topic than Minesweeper. Making those lower thirds was fun, though!
• [YTP] Evolution of Mario's Voice (1983-2023): My favourite video of the year! And it took about half a day's worth of effort! I genuinely had a ton of fun making this video, as it was just a way to stitch together a bunch of fun, vaguely connected jokes together but still have it form this stupid little collage of Mario history. The Breaking Bad joke was the best thing I edited this year, even though all I did was take a green screen effect that someone made and apply it. I do think it drags a bit much on the Nintendo Direct/Chris Pratt portion, but it makes sense considering the original video idea was to just make a YTP of the trailer that was released then (which I'm glad I didn't do). Final fun fact: the original video wasn't tagged as a YTP, partly to fool people into clicking on it thinking it was a real video, but partly because the video is like a wordless visual essay (imagine a really stupid Crowbcat video).
• 13 Days of Halloween: If it wasn't for the park bench video, this might be my least favourite. The motivations for this video were trying out real life filming, as well as trying to tell a short (original!) story through video. I sort of accomplished both of those things, but the end result is a bit messy. I recorded with my phone and edited with real Windows Movie Maker, which turns out is hard to get a hold of on Windows 10. The bottleneck of this project was definitely Windows Movie Maker, as it had MANY issues with stability and audio just NOT staying with video. Outside of the editing pains, the video is definitely a bit sluggish, somewhat by design (the long walks were meant to build tension, but I don't have a great grasp of horror). However, I am happy with the ...---... bit in the video as it's a neat detail for attentive viewers.
• My First Hour of Among Us VR: Fun fact: I've never played this game since the footage from this video. Despite that, I had a lot of fun in my first time through and wanted to share my experience with just a few friends at first. After not much convincing at all, I made the vid public and behold! A terrible screen resolution for all to see (I assumed my Quest 2 was recording in a normal format, but I assumed wrong apparently). This video was the least effort of the year, even with some captions that I think were worth the effort. I'm also glad that there's at least one video of my voice that doesn't sound terrible (and this one wasn't even recorded with my good mic). Small little gameplay videos like these might be fun to work on in the future if they end up like this.

Wow! That's a lot of words! Well, I'm glad this year ended up being so productive for me. In terms of next year, I'm already excited to show what I've got in store. There is one planned video in particular that I already think will be better than everything before it, guaranteed. I hope it's obvious which one it is, and I hope you enjoy it and other future videos, too.