BTM: The BatDance!

Camera: Samsung Camcorder

Editing Program: iMovie/Adobe Premiere

Other Equipment: Acer Aspire Laptop, a stack of my roommate’s books, my bedsheet

I like Batman. I like being Batman. I am also crazy.

So if I’m stuck in an empty dorm hall for three days with no money due to a bank error, well I might just spend two hours dancing around to a playlist of songs in my Batman costume.

This video was a lot of effort for what it’s worth. I spent about an hour prepping everything (to give you some hindsight, the costume takes about 10 minutes to put on), another two-three hours filming, and around three hours of initial editing time on iMovie. When I edited it a second time a year later on Premiere, it took another two hours. Even the thumbnail took a solid two hours to create because I just couldn’t get the blur working right on Photoshop. Adding it all up, that’s about 11 hours of work for a three minute video that only got 65 views after three months.

The craziest part is that I spent all of this time on this one video and I never planned for it to go on YouTube. I only put it up because I needed a filler video to buy me editing time for next week’s video.

But I made this video and put all of this effort into it, not even planning on publishing it or anything, because I wanted to.

 

It was an idea that plagued me for months. I just thought that the idea of someone dancing to various songs dressed as Batman was hilarious. So on day two or three of my terrible spring break locked up in my dorm room, I was suffering from torturous boredom that I don’t handle well and finally fulfilled the idea that has always sat in the back of my mind.

That’s the beauty of making videos and running your own channel is that you get to do whatever you want. You can dress up as Batman and dance to songs that were miraculously never caught by Content ID. You can make videos stating your opinions on other YouTubers. You can teach people about copyright. You can do whatever you want with your own channel and video making abilities!

This is a good example.

There’s a certain freedom with running your own channel and making your own videos. It’s all on you on how you want to run a YouTube channel. If you want to listen to the industry experts and make each video a replica of what they say a perfect viral video is, then that’s fine. I’m just saying that it’s pretty fun to dress up as Batman and dance around to a playlist of silly songs. It’s even more fun to share that video among your friends and watch them get a kick out of you making a fool of yourself.

Making videos should be fun. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to be this viral internet sensation. I think WheezyWaiter said it best in this video, but honestly YouTube shouldn’t just be about going viral. It started out as a community of people who enjoy making videos just for the fun of it, so why can’t we continue that now?

BTM: BEST SONG EVER!! | Facebook Contest

 

Camera: Samsung Camcorder

Editing Program: Adobe Premiere

Other Equipment: Nate’s Acoustic Guitar

This is the story of how a completely awful video of me singing turned into a semi-entertaining Facebook contest announcement video.  However, that conversion isn’t an easy one.

First, songwriting is hard. I didn’t realize how hard it was until I made a completely awful video attempting to do so. I thought I could just sing the lyrics I wanted to sing and edit it all together. I was wrong. You cannot do that. You need a consistent bed of music and you should probably write down your lyrics first rather than improvising like I did. Also you should probably be good at singing, unlike me.

I’m not good at singing.

Second, I lost the video file when I re-edited it to accommodate the Facebook contest. After spending about an hour editing it the first time around, I went back to check on it so I could make a new thumbnail and it disappeared. I honestly have no idea where it went. I checked all four of my flash drives and my memory card and it was gone.

Third, editing the same video for a second time has its pros and cons. For one thing, you’re editing the same video WHICH IS BORING. However the second thing is that you get so bored with editing it the second time that you actually improve it because you try new things just to spite yourself and it ends up working out way better than your original idea.

Fourth, the goddamn copyright. After spending about an hour and a half re-editing this video, I had to take it down and re-edit it for a third time because YouTube immediately put a copyright claim on it. Now I was well within fair use because it wasn’t for profit (check out my post about copyright here), but YouTube’s system is very wonky and it still marked it down. So I re-edited it for a third time and placed a public domain song in there instead.

The moral of the story is that you can make an awful video and still redeem it, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of stuff will go wrong before that can happen.

The other moral is that I spent way too much time on this video and as retribution, everyone should go like my Facebook page to participate in my Facebook contest!

BTM: LESS THAN FAMOUS – The Maddness

Camera: DSLR (Canon Rebel)

Editing Program: Adobe Premiere

Other Equipment: Monopod

This video was created as an audition for the VidCon “Less Than Famous” panel. I’ve always wanted to attend VidCon and I figured that being a panelist at VidCon would be fun. If anything, it would be a new challenge for me.

I wrote the video’s outline during a bout of insomnia about a week before we filmed. For the most part, we mostly stuck to that outline. However there was originally a scene where I forced two innocent bystanders to take a selfie with me because I was convinced they were my fans. But ultimately I didn’t even film that scene because I failed to contact the two people I had in mind for it.

Another difference between the original outline and the finished product is the style of the video. Alex and Stephanie originally only had one scripted line each while the majority of the video was focused on me. But we found out that their improvisations to my questions were funnier and worked better since I improvised a bit from my own script so I just treated their scenes as if they were actual interviews instead and edited accordingly.

We filmed on Thursday night and I edited it Friday morning, making it one of the fastest turnarounds on The Maddness. Stephanie, who has helped out on multiple Maddness productions, filmed my scene since monopods are actually terrible for standing on their own. Unfortunately, I actually take forever to say my lines so Stephanie had to find a creative solution to keep watching her baseball game while I filmed.

True dedication

Editing was fun, as usual. I spent a little more time than I should’ve on the lower lefts, but I think they turned out well. I also opted out of the usual end card and blooper because it’s a contest entry. I still need to work on the time it takes to deliver my lines. Stephanie and Alex each only took a minute or two to say all of their lines while all of my footage amounted to around 15 minutes even though I only used a minute of it.

Overall, I would say that this is a solid video. I’m not going to say it’s the best entry in the contest because I know it’s not, but it’s solid for a Maddness video. Like I said in the video, it’s fun to make videos with my friends. Stephanie and Alex are awesome, fun to work with, and I’m forever thankful that they helped me out on this video with such short notice.