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I really, really, most definitely need to update this blog more often. I keep meaning to, but I always end up distracted.
So, what’s been happening? Well, for a start, I’ve become slightly famous. Only slightly, of course, but tellingly. One of my YouTube videos was recently featured on the German front page of YouTube, and as a result, within a week I doubled my subscriber base. That put my channel inside the top 100 most subscribed German Director accounts of all time, which appears to be some sort of critical mass: suddenly, my videos are getting thousands of hits.
Not only that, but I’ve been getting fan mail. Not as much as, say, Matt Damon or Meryl Streep, but fan mail all the same. Now, the trouble is that I’d very much like to answer it all, but I haven’t been able to yet.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve been made a YouTube partner. This is a relatively new scheme, and has only just arrived in Germany: I am among the first batch of German partners. This means that I can choose to “monetize” my videos. If you view monetized videos on the YouTube site itself, you’ll see adverts placed next to them: I get a share of the revenue.
That sounds like I’m selling out, but it’s not that much. I’m not allowed to say how much money I’m making, but it’s no secret that I won’t be moving to Martinique in the near future.
Of course, before I can monetize any video, I have to make sure I have the right to use every last photograph, piece of music and sound effect commercially; in turn, that means I’ve spent the last couple of days watching all my 73 videos and trying to remember where I got stuff from.
On top of all that, I’ve been helping out with publicity material for a YouTube meet planned for August, and trying not to neglect my real work.
So please: be patient and understanding. What I’d like to say is: Thank you everyone who has sent me nice e-mails and messages. They are appreciated, and I do read them all.
Did I mention I’m a Doctor Who fan? Well, I’m not so sure now. I just saw Voyage of the Damned.
Yes, I know that was last year’s Christmas special, but I just hadn’t got around to seeing it until last night. I was, you might say, singularly unimpressed, although that apparently puts me at odds with 12 million of my fellow Brits. But I have now vented my frustration elsewhere, so rather than revent it here, let me just give you a link: My review of Voyage of the Damned on the Gallifrey5Forum. It contains spoilers, just in case you’re one of the lucky few who haven’t seen it yet.
When I first got my YouTube account, I didn’t realise that many people viewed it as a social networking site. Personally, I see it more as a resource for hosting videos with some basic social networking capabilities, but there you go.
Still, despite YouTube’s huge size, the celebrity-and-networking world is surprisingly small. The relatively few big names pop up all over the place, and quite often collaborate with each other on video projects. A little cry of recognition has more than once escaped my lips on seeing a video collaboration by one of the really big stars featuring one of my subscribers.
“Collabs”, though, have their good points and their bad points. One the one hand, it’s sometimes necessary to have an extra character, even if only the voice, such as Paperlilies’s cameo in ChurchOfBlow’s video 1335Date.Com. On the other hand, a collab can be seen as a cheap way to gain attention.
This is a parody of the worst sort of collab: a collab that never needed to be a collab in the first place. And perhaps one of the most clichéd collabs of all is the one-YouTuber-phones-another variety. No wonder nobody else wanted to work on it.
In the spirit of learning by your mistakes, there are a couple of glaring ones in this short. For a start, I didn’t frame myself on the sofa very well: I”d framed the scene with myself leaning back, but most of the time I was sitting up straight, so the top of my head ended up cut off and I was looking out of the frame. Also, I didn’t give myself enough time between getting under that newspaper and reacting to the phone: I had to use a freeze frame to get a couple of seconds of myself asleep. That really shouldn’t happen.
Incidentally, until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure how to make it sound as if my voice was coming through the phone. The software’s presets just weren’t terribly effective, and I fiddled about with the graphic equalizer to no avail — until, by chance, I read about telephone technology. To allow a single wire to carry several signals at once, the telephone system throws out anything with a frequency of more than 4kHz. So, to get that tinny sound, arrange the sliders like so: Everything above 4kHz is set to zero, the next slider goes all the way up to the top, and the remaining sliders are arranged in a gentle slope, the leftmost slider near the bottom.
This is just a bit of fun I had, so there’s no point in telling me how much I suck at American accents and impersonations: that wasn’t the point.
One of the things I’ve never really understood is why our English teachers ever thought it was cool to teach us Shakespeare by forcing us to analyse every stanza and every line, managing to make something which had been written for entertainment and making it boring. Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar could thus be reduced to so many rhetorical devices which the original audiences, of course, probably didn’t even consciously notice.
As a matter of fact, of course, it’s a point of high drama. Antony has been put in a difficult spot: He has to say something about his friend and ally Julius Caesar, but without getting it in the neck from Caesar’s assassins. There’s nothing pompous about it at all: it’s a speech which, by the end, fairly drips with viscious sarcasm, as he tells the crowd that if Brutus says Caesar was a megalomaniac, then obviously it must be true. imdjdan’s video “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” - Cowboy Style actually gets it right, and does so better than a lot of more professional renditions I’ve had the misfortune to see.
That’s the starting point: how easy it is to get this stuff wrong. Of course, the way the idea developed, I moved away from that, and it became a nice study in silliness, which I think is a legitimate thing in its own right. You might detect some thinly veiled comment on, for example, the way in which Hollywood’s depiction of violence has evolved from one extreme to the other, but don’t read too much into what is, really, just me messing around.
Before Doctor Who fans complain that the scene I am parodying is from an episode that was first screened in 2005, I should point out that the episode in question — The Christmas Invasion — was a one-off special that falls between the 2005 and 2006 seasons. Given that it stars David Tennant (and yes, it’s a terrible impersonation), it fits better with the 2006 season.
As if I didn’t have enough to do today, what with paperwork and unexpected commissions, some lady came round today selling apples and potatoes “fresh from the farm”. She actually had half an apple in her hand, and was slicing off a bite-sized morsel just as I opened the door.
After a while in a place like this, you begin to know instinctively when to deliver a brusque “No, thanks” and shut the door. It was only afterwards that it struck me. Fresh apples and potatoes from the farm — in May?
No wonder she had that look of desparation on her face. She might have had a little success in the big city, but around here I imagine the most common response would have been a hollow laugh.