Mr. Beast is a 24-year-old normal guy from Kansas.
A University dropout.
His YouTube channel reached 112 million subscribers on November 17, 2022, making it the fourth-most-subscribed on the platform, and the highest as a non-corporate identity.
Aside from his philanthropy, everyone studies his simple but effective VIDEO storytelling.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I rarely go back and rewatch TV or movies.
But the 2010 to 2017 modern-day London adaptation of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson has stayed on my mind.
It was the first major television series I can recall that used YouTube editing techniques to tell the story.
It’s even more impressive considering how poor the digital video software was over those years. They used Avid Media Composer.
Today the most popular software packages are:
Fast paced, irreverent, funny. Cumberbatch is perfect as the brilliant high functioning sociopath.
Amanda Abbington, Freeman’s then-real life partner, plays Mary Morstan, Watson’s girlfriend and eventual wife. A nice touch. They have 2 children together.
First time around I was a bit disappointed in his archenemy Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) — but that weird performance seemed better to me on second watching.
Of course everyone would love to see more episodes, but it seems unlikely.
For one thing, the season 4 was good, but inferior to all the preceding episodes.
Here’s a montage on Vimeo of some of the video editing techniques.
To celebrate, I’m posting my hiking highlights of the past year.
I got a cheap drone December 2021 and most of the clips are from the drone.
My favourite music of 2022 was by Odesza — so it’s appropriate that the soundtrack is one of their songs: Wide Awake.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The John Lewis Christmas ad is now such a big annual tradition that it feels like the official start of the festive season. …
Mashable
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. This is fantastic.
“Over 108,000 children in the UK are in the care system. We’re making a longterm commitment to support the futures of young people from care.”
When pandemic cancelled all my travel and Gymnastics coaching gigs, I took the time to improve my video editing. It’s become my main hobby.
Three phases (so far):
After posting my French Creek tribute, I declared I was GOOD ENOUGH at video editing technology for my purposes. I could sit down at a table with a professional video editor and understand 75% of what they were talking about. 😀
Far more difficult is to decide on what story to tell. And to tell it effectively. Many super skillful editors struggle finding their next story.
I threw this short video together quickly as a teaser for my How to Survive the West Coast Trail videos. But in some weird way, it’s evocative of that wild and challenging hike. It tells the story well
I’m particularly happy with the audio.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Putting these together is incredibly time consuming.
I kept trying to find ways to improve my efficiency. And that ended up evolving into my personal style of video — as of October 2022, at least. Who knows what’s next? 😀
I posted Valencia, Spain in January 2022. My edits today are all similar. But I’m adding more personal drone footage rather than drone stock video.
What is my style?
Challenging for me is finding the right music for each story.
One of my best edits was Norway Highlights. I credit the song — Odesza Higher Ground — as once I decided on the soundtrack, it was easy to decide where to put each clip. In the example, below, the colours are music blocks to be filled with scenes I decide upon later.
Increasingly I’m picking music first, shooting the video later.
Odesza is my favourite band right now. Very popular for YouTube edits.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
What’s next?
I’ve been studying Colour Grading through a course called … Color Grading Academy.
It’s a very complicated process.
Some of the best video editors online send out their final product for Colour experts to finish. An art, not a science.
Things I’ve decided NOT to use:
P.S.
I posted the Englishman River Falls hike in November 2020 and again in October 2022. I’ve definitely improved.
Click PLAY or watch the Nov 2020 edit on YouTube. I was quite happy with it. But NOW I’m wondering what weird colour grade I was experimenting with at that time. 😀
Click PLAY or watch the Oct 2022 edit on YouTube.
DJI (Da-Jiang Innovations) manufactures commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for aerial photography and videography. It also designs and manufactures camera gimbals, action cameras, camera stabilizers, flight platforms, propulsion systems and flight control systems.
DJI accounts for around 70% of the world’s consumer drone market as of March 2020. …
US government institutions have prohibited the internal use of DJI products …
There have been security concerns. Perhaps their products will get banned in Canada one day.
For now, I use their (Mavic) Mini SE drone. And OM 5 gimbal.
I highly doubt Chinese cyber hackers are (somehow) seeing what I do. But if they are, I’d welcome feedback on my videos. 😀
DJI just opened their new Shenzhen, China headquarters — a creative “community in the sky.”
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Nuseir Yassin is an Arab–Israeli vlogger who is most notable for creating over 1,000 daily one-minute-long videos on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram under the page Nas Daily.
One reason I like Nas is his open-minded worldview. A Palestinian Israeli. With a Jewish American girlfriend.
With Nas Daily videos, he tries to bring people together.
They are very uplifting.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
A good book. Interesting and entertaining.
By Mark Bergen, a technology reporter at Bloomberg.
Published Sept 2022.
The biggest surprise was learning that YouTube’s algorithm actually kept most of Trump’s BIG LIE from getting promoted in early 2021. They were ready.
YouTube did a surprisingly good job of not promoting vaccine misinformation, as well.
You can find that stuff on YouTube, for sure. But it’s not being massively promoted for money.
As FREE enterprise, YouTube is FREE to post and promote whatever they want.
I’ve removed monetization from all my videos and websites.
If you eliminate ads and ad-driven algorithms, most social media problems disappear.
Google is a great search engine but I find YouTube to be quite lousy at listing either popular, quality, or related videos. Search for any topic you know well. Disappointing.
I spend a couple of hours most days on YouTube. No ads as I pay CAD$12 / month for YouTube Premium.
YouTube was super disorganized right from the start.
After Google bought the video site and made it #1, problems evolved as millions of “creators” devised hacks to make money off the site.
Despite all its growth and success, YouTube has been widely criticized.
Criticism of YouTube includes the website being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation, copyright issues, routine violations of its users’ privacy, enabling censorship, and endangering child safety and wellbeing. …
YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, designed to provide an experience optimized for children. …
YouTube removed public display of dislike counts on videos in November 2021, claiming the reason for the removal was, based on its internal research, that users often used the dislike feature as a form of cyberbullying and brigading. …
… public access to YouTube is blocked in many countries, including China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan. …
related – Nilay Patel – Everyone knows what YouTube is — few know how it really works
The first video uploaded to the site was by YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim, who was 25 years old at the time: “Me at the zoo”
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
That was Apr 23, 2005.
I first embedded a YouTube video on one of my sites in January 2006.
In March 2006, I embedded a clip of Peter and Joyce Long who had been interviewed by a TV crew on a kayak outing.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
In those days, the race to become the #1 video uploading site was competitive. Vimeo launched earlier, for example.
But these guys won out in the end.
The trio were early employees of PayPal, three of the PayPal Mafia along with Elon Musk, Russel Simmons (Yelp), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and more.
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. It would have been Google or Yahoo. Google was willing to pay more.
FOX was also interested, but Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation had wasted $580m buying Myspace in 2005. They eventually sold MySpace for $35m.
YouTube had $19.8 billion in revenue in 2020. I send YouTube CAD $12 every month for YouTube Premium. Ad free videos. My music subscription. And a few other perks.
One of my most popular videos is from the early days. 😀 Low resolution. No editing. #bad
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Hillier Smith is one of the best online.
AND is one of the few of the best who takes the time to explain how he puts story together.
If I could do 1% of this — I’d be thrilled.
Especially 1% of his sound design.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Rick McCharles 