Pre-3,000 views channel views

I figured rather than discussing everything behind the ‘Channel View’ videos, I think I’ll explain what lead up to the 3K one because there was alot going into them after that point, before then they were simple videos.

So it had been 2 months of making YTPs and I noticed I was close to gaining 1,000 views. This really meant alot to me since I had previously worked hard to make stuff for an account on the internet before on an old DeviantArt account under the name ‘Tenguman.exe’. I spent about a year on it and never got noticed by that many people and never got anywhere near 1,000 views, so needless to say I got bored of it then stopped using it. So clearly this was much more of a calling. On DA, many people have a habit to make a submission to celebrate when they get 1,000 views, so I thought I could do the same, it did mean alot after all. So I got a simple idea to show a scene from AOSTH where scratch tells grounder (a pair of comic relief villains if you don’t watch the show) that he is driving him bonkers, at the time I was addicted to the song ‘Bonkers’ by ‘Dizzy Racial’ so I did a follow-up scene of grounder acting wacky from other clips in the episode whilst playing the song. It was the kind of YTP-style humour I was used to so it helped me feel comfortable with the video I was making.

Simple idea right? That was the problem, it was too simple, I felt I needed something a bit more. So I thought I could make these channel view videos into a type of video where I try something new every video, a chance to break the mould on my video-making. So I dared to...record my own voice. Good god was it nerve-wrecking. What if my voice comes out sounding terrible? What if I get loads of comments from people from different parts of the world complaining about how I talked? What if this was all a big mistake? Well now wasn’t the time for doubt, now was the time for doing. So, nervous as hell, I recorded some lines for my video, I did some with some clips in mind. Then when it was done I types up some of what I said to screens and also gathered the clips I planned to dub-over.

It still felt all too short so I added something extra....clips on ‘feedback’ for the video. I gathered clips that basically say ‘this video is crap’ in order to make fun of myself. I love mockery comedy, but there’s a golden rule to it, if you’re going to make fun of other things, you must be prepared to be made fun of yourself, and the easiest way to do that is to make fun of yourself. It helps prepare you well, when someone taunts your video, you can nod your head and say “I agree”, it also prevents ego problems as well. Finally I felt the video had everything it needed, I waited till I actually got 1,000 views b4 I submitted it....which was the following day, so I submitted it right after I got washed and dressed that mourning. Interestingly enough this is the only channel view video to be submitted on the day I got said many videos. How ironic.

Huzzah, it got positive feedback. This was a sign to me that there’s nothing wrong with using my voice, so I could use it in future videos. What a relief...also I’ll note on this video I took a screenshot of my current userpage at the time. And funny enough, even though it was before I used Drogo in my videos, Drogo was actually there in my background (and a random imp getting high for my icon). This was back when I deemed Drogo to be a concept I could never bring to public and had ‘shelved’ the idea (as explained in the video ‘Drogo’s Anniversary’), I’ll explain on the next blog what lead to that.

A month later I was closing up to 2,000 views. Once again I decided to try something new, knowing that voicing was an option and being a fan of Yu-Gi-Oh abridged I tired doing the ‘abridging’ thing myself. I decided to joke on how the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise overuses the concept ‘most powerful cards in the game’ over and over in each incarnation of the anime. The things I didn’t cover was how they often seem to ignore the concept when the cards became more well-established, I mean sure the Egyptian gods were kick-ass when seen in seasons 2 & 3, but after that they seemed to lose this powerful presence as the series went on, season 4 had them being kidnapped like video game princesses to power an unholy monster, then they were seen struggling to fight a giant monster with a dragon-crouch until they fused together to become a woman that beat it in one blast....that’s right, a dragon, a phoenix, and a muscular demon fuse to make a human/humanoid woman....did I miss something here?  Did I mention she talks as well...what are these things? The most powerful MONSTERS in the game or a concept the writers just didn’t know how to portray? And the movie made them useless until the last few minutes of the film. And that’s just the first series, GX had the blatant rip-offs that bring forth the apocalypse when used...or at least they did the first time they were used, 2 seasons later this threat is gone and they’re pretty much just regular cards....dam powerful ones, but the cyberdarks seemed more dangerous than those skeletal clowns...aw well, at least their fusion looked like a real monster. 5Ds gave us too much of ‘most powerful cards’, mostly season 2 fault but to be honest season 2 seems like a bad fanfiction to the first one. Leo is not a signer, Leo is not a signer, Leo is not a signer...wait, we changed our minds, Leo is a signer after all....seriously? luckily when making this video only season 1 was out and YGO was safe from me going to town with them for the follow-up, so I just mocked the more original yet still repetitive version of ‘most strongest monsters in game’, the ‘evil signer non-dragons’...I mean ‘Earthbound Immortals’.

So I had the idea, time to script, gather clips, voice, add some extra bits and then submit. As I hinted this one was late...a day late mind you but still late. But that wasn’t the problem, the problem was that the video wasn’t well-received from people. Maybe it was the low quality of the mic, maybe people compared it too much to YGOA and it didn’t meet up to it or maybe I just wasn’t the sort of person for abridging. Either way, I did this to try new things and see if they work and it didn’t and so I learnt something (coincidently I also got a new mic sometime after that which had much better quality, it was actually got for skype, but either way this was the last video to use the old mic).

When I tried something new for 3,000 views, I found something that not only worked, it would change my account for ever in more ways than one...but that’s another story. I will mention that it changed the channel view videos to something much more different. Which later on lead to some ‘early instalment weirdness’ (as TV Tropes would put it) for those who enjoy the recent ones and go back to check the earlier ones.

So that’s it for now, tune it next time where I’ll look over the creation of Drogo and what lead him to stand where he is now.

-beats0me

Making YouTube Poops

So I’ve explained what lead me to making the videos, I think i’ll discuss....making the videos, well, more making videos as a whole, stating what each individual one went through will be too long.

So as I said, after the test video the YTPs (YouTube Poop) came first. At the time I was a huge YTP fan, particularly the robotnik ones (using clips from ‘Adventures of Soinc the Hedgehog’), AOSTH robotnik has such colourful dialogue along with that wacky charm in the animation (like alot of the old cartoons had back before all modern cartoons were animated by Korea), so making these mash-up videos using him was a golden idea. Unfortunately YTPs generally have a bad reputations since 90% are amateur videos repeating the same scene 50 times, finding the good ones often takes some digging through all the bad ones. So it goes without saying that I decided to avoid doing that and actually put effort into the videos.

Being a big fan of YuGiOh GX at the time I decided to make a GX YTP and since I enjoyed the robotnik YTPs so much I made my first as robotnik based as it was GX based. It was fun watching the clips of both shows and deciding what mash-up jokes I could do. I gave the first one a joke title which was more like a sentence based on theme to many YTPs, I called it “Chazz lends money to Dr. Robotnik”, the joke continued at the top of the description where I added ‘unfortunately Chazz is a loan shark’ (which much later caused the video to be posted on websites discussing loan sharks along with other videos with ‘loan shark’ in the description or search tags regardless of whether they were actually relevant....im not kidding, google it and see). The first YTP was tricky to make since I didn’t actually have ‘Adobe Premier’ on my computer and had to make it during free time on the university computers carrying around the resources on a memory stick (and the second for the same reason. Looking back, I think the first video came out rather well, still makes me chuckle today, sadly throwing in GX japanese credits and dubbing over the theme to the film ‘Critters’ ruins it (even if it’s a catchy song), it was based on how many of many YTPs that would have the AOSTH credits at the end and would dub over a random song, I did that for a couple more YTPs before realising what I was doing and deciding to give it a rest. Another amusing thing about the first was at the very last millisecond, I had a message saying ‘I bet that really excited my 1 subscriber’ (a joke at myself but I was actually amazed to have even 1 subscriber at time seeing as how my account had basically nothing, thinking back that also inspired me to make videos, even if the subscription probably meant nothing to the person who subscribed and I don’t think it did), but due to it being on the very last millisecond it was cut-off by YouTube so no-one saw the joke, at that point I learnt to give a gap after any final scene in a video so it doesn’t get cut-off. I expected to get some hateful comments but luckerly didn’t and got some positive feedback.

So I decided to make a second which is still pretty memorable because of the ‘Pot Of Greed’ scene which includes every single scene from YuGiOh GX where they use the card POG (which lets you draw 2 cards) and ends with a scene that says ‘I bet your sick of seeing Pot Of Greed now’ along with dubbing robotnik over saying ‘I’ve seen enough’. That scene was based on the many comments on the GX clips on YouTube stating how many times this series uses that card, or worse, explain for the 100th time what it does (the fact it was so overused makes it funnier that the real life card is banned in tournaments now). Robtonik wasn’t as heavierly used as the first which became a theme for the future ones as well. The second was longer, whether or not it lives up or outdoes the first I’m not sure of, but its defiantly more worth watching that most YTPs.

The title joke later became a running joke in my YTPs to have a sentence title that mentions different GX main character in the title and having the sentence continue in the description, some of them named after an actual scene in the video, such as “Bastion requests more screen time” “he ends up with less” where bastion only appears in one scene asking ‘is it time for my cameo yet?’ and is responded with robotnik telling him “no no no no no no maybe nope never”. Other themes includes the joke written at the end of every video and having the ‘sonic says’ clip appearing at the end right before the final joke, again based off other YTPs. There was also a running gag of having duel monsters ‘firing their lasers’, often with a follow-up pointing this out. Another thing to note was the more I made the less heavy the usage of GX clips became, soon they were a mix of various clips with a few GX ones in.

After that I went home for the Christmas holidays and my dad installed Adobe Premier on my computer so now I could work on them anytime I wanted. To celebrate I decided to make a new video. Many of you might not know this but I actually used to make videos in Microsoft PowerPoint using techniques similar to the ones I use for my other videos, one of them was my own tribute to the things that YTP have in them....unfortunately this was back before I saw the really good ones and was based on the style alot of the poor ones had and thusly was completely different from my sense of humour to my recent ones. Sadly I didn’t notice this at the time and decided to re-make the Volvic advert-based YTP anyway now I had the proper recourses anyway, as you can imagine, viewers took a confused reaction from it. Looking back it was a mistake, but mistakes are good as well, you learn from them, as did I. I continued making more using the style of the first 2 and gathered many more viewers.

I think one of the most memorable moments for me was in ‘I’m having a flashback nine to five’ (one of the few YTPs to not have a GX charather in the name), the video was notoable as a whole being the first request video I ever did but the thing I really remember was a scene where it shows my name ‘beats0me’ and voiceover states the name is apparently an anagram of ‘teams be0s’ (which was wrong and later followed by ‘beats0me is not an anagram of any kind’ which is the truth, the scene was to make fun of wacky fan theories). In the scene the letters move and rearrange themselves to spell out the new word, seems simple right? Well it would be if every letter wasn’t a single object meaning for the first time ever I had a large number of objects in the same scene, at the time it was very complex and confusing to animate multiple objects at once, but I got there in the end (this scene would later have a successor for being the scene with the most objects in one scene from my first Halloween video ‘when the laughter stopped’ which had all 6 of Cherry’s ‘legs’ as separate objects, along with Cherry’s head and body [separate so that the legs are positioned between them], Drogo’s head and body [separate because Drogo’s head was following Cherry jumping, the blood on the ground] and the white background...and also helmut walking in is another object as well]).

Towards the end I became less and less interested with making YTPs, seeing as how I was more into the ‘Channel View Videos’ and ideas based around the ‘Touhou Project’ series (ironically, my first reference to the touhou series was in a YTP). I tried to come back to them with ‘Chumley inspires the nation’, although funny, it felt weaker than most the others. I felt I had ‘jumped the shark’ with YTPs and decided to stop making them. I came back to it briefly taking part in a YTP tennis video (one person makes a video, the other person mashes it up, then the first one mashes it up, then the second again, the process repeats in this back and forth process, just like with the back and forth-ness of tennis, hence the name), but on the third round they basically spent a few hours mashing up the video I made whilst I spent several days on it. With no effort meant there was no new material to work with so I stopped there. Nowadays YTPs aren’t really fun to make anymore. I think what really sucked the fun out of it is this one fan who obnoxiously keeps pestering me to make more until recently I snapped and told him I won’t make anymore and to stop asking me to, to which he said I overacted and that he doesn’t ask that much ¬_¬. Sure its because he enjoys them, but no-one else (including me) does, and as they say ‘the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few’.

Nowadays no-one really watches my YTPs because most my viewers are more interested in my videos based on the touhou project series, particularly the sketch videos, but now I think about things that’s okay. I was still new to everything back then and YTPs gave me the experience of what being on YouTube is like and paved the path for the future videos. In a way, the YTPs and the touhou sketches aren’t so different, they’re both based on ‘rapid-fire comedy’, to launch joke after joke, some won’t land but hats okay because others will, some might even hit hard. So if it weren’t for the early videos that most viewers don’t notice, I wouldn’t have the newer videos that every viewer watches.

Well I wrote down more than I expected so I think I’ll save the channel view videos and touhou videos for another time.  But anyway, that’s the basic outline for making my YTPs....ore at least what I can remember of them.

-beats0me

The origin of my account

A good first place for a discussion topic, how my account began shaping itself.

I created my account during my college years for a reason you may not have guessed....so i could watch videos that had been flagged for being too violent...yea...the most common reason anyone makes an account on YouTube....well that and adding videos to your favourites to bookmark them.

That’s also the reason for the name ‘beats0me’, it’s a joke name. When you sign up YouTube asks for your name, I responded “beats me” (as in “I don’t know”) and YouTube responds “okay, your name is beats me”. I later added a zero for spacing.

It’s a joke that originates from playing pokemon, especially in later games where at the beginning the prof asks whether you’re a boy or a girl. Sure, it makes sense since it’s a video game and this is the ‘sign-up sheet’ part at the very beginning, but if you look into it too hard then you realise someone is standing in front of you asking your gender, so in later games I had some fun with that (btw, I’ve been playing with these games since the start of the series oversees release). “Are you a boy or a girl” “take a good look old man, does this look like a girl to you?” “ah, I see, you are a girl, what is your name” “dunno >:|” “okay then, your name is dunno”, so through that process I ended up playing as a girl called ‘dunno’. And that’s where the joke comes from...yes I have a very silly sense of humour at times.

When the account later become more well-known people pointed out that the zero looks like an ‘o’ making it look like ‘beatsome’ which people would space out as ‘beat some’. I assure you this is coincidence, the name means unsurity no violence. I was also nicked named ‘beats’ for short which is a nickname I’ve come to like and use myself alot. I never saw it coming when i first made the account though.

Speaking of back when the account was first made....back to when the account was first made. For 2 years I did nothing with the account except watching videos, during the 2^nd year I did get more involved with it and started commenting on peoples videos though, i even made friends through this.

So we fast forward to my first year of university in 2010, we were given an assignment to animate a dancing character with a 3D program called Maya. I later did some editing with it in another program the course introduced me to, adobe premiere. As well as doing a write-up for it and handed it in, me and the other students were recommended to submit it to YouTube to get some feedback there, I was a bit reluctant to doing so since i didn’t use my account for anything but I decided to do it in the end anyway.

And on that day something would happen which would change the account forever, I received a comment for it. It was from ‘TheAnimationEmpire’, a friend I made through commenting on videos (whom I haven’t spoken to a while now I think about it). That day I felt something, a good feeling, a feeling of importance to the world, I had uploaded a video to the internet and someone miles away had watched it and gave feedback...and they liked it (or found it amusing anyway). So much feeling went through me that moment, to be recognised, to bring joy to someone, from that point on; I was inspired to make more videos.

So I had to inspiration, and a program to make videos, what do I make them on? At the time I was a huge YTP fan (YouTube Poop...yea that’s why we just use the letters), which are mash-up videos, to take clips, jumble them up and make characters do or say funny things (and the really crap ones repeating the same thing 50 times), so I thought I could give it a go myself.

I wasn’t sure how everything properly works with exporting and submitting and all that so I made a test video to test it, it was simple and part of a meme so that made it okay to submit. It was part of the ‘this video will be flagged’ meme where you take a clip from a TV show or film where it sound like someone is saying something vulgar when there actually not and repeat it several thousand times (like Mario from the ‘Super Mario World’ saying ‘ass’ when he was actually saying ‘pass’ or from the German pokerap; ‘Seemon’ [Seadra in English] which sound like ‘Semen’), in this case it was Yubel from YuGiOh GX saying ‘fought’ which sounds like ‘f***ed’ (makes it funnier that the sentence was ‘you fought with the chance of ever releasing me’), i got the clip by downloading the episode it comes from off of YouTube (knowing YouTube, it’s probably deleted now), I snipped it down to that snippet, copied and pasted it till it was a minute long, exported it, submitted it and added details to it.

So now I knew the right way to go about making them, I went on to making YTPs....

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I’ll stop there cuz that’s a lot down all ready, I’ll continue on it some more when I get some feedback comments for this blog.

So that’s the story of how a YouTube account created but with no intention of submitting began to find its legs.

-beats0me

So it looks like i'm blogging now

Hello anyone who might be reading this.

I am a YouTuber under the account name beats0me, I upload videos enjoyed by many there.

So I’ve noticed that all the professional animators or professionals in general often make their own blogs and write up stuff which may or may not interest their fans...I am nowhere near being professional (or at least that’s how I see it) but it could help step in the right way anyway.

So I hope in future I will write about the creative thought process that goes through making these videos, many of the things that lead me here today and probably some other stuff like who inspires or inspired me.

So I hope at least some people will take time out to read what I write and I hope I write up some good stuff, because a good blog can often open your mind to new things...okay i’ll probably never be that good, but who knows.

That’s it for now

-beats0me