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!
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?
The Maddness 