The 100,000 Subscriber Special
0:00 I remember it was early 2015 when I created this channel. It was a dark, rainy Friday night that turned into an early Sunday morning, but after a few days of considering it, I decided to finally search Google for how I could create a YouTube channel. I was 14 at the time and had no real set idea for what I would do with it. After deliberating a few names, it was because of that that I finally named the channel Mr. Amazing.
Well, 2017 now seems to be the time for compilations of older vines and widespread meme edits, 2015 was the time for cringe compilations on YouTube. What cringe really was was something nobody really touched on. It was just something you felt as visceral sort of displeasure at what you were viewing, deem secondhand embarrassment according to some. It was out of that idea that we got subreddits and websites based all around the concept, and eventually compilations on YouTube streaming these sorts of videos together. From about 2013 to the creation of my channel, the genre remained pretty stagnant. YouTube channels generally with under 10,000 subscribers were uploading
1:01 these videos pretty inconsistently, some channels even having a mere one or two cringe videos on them. These same clips were used over and over, even in new videos that were released. As you could probably tell, I was an avid watcher of these videos, and these were things that started to bug me.
It was around this time in late 2014 that I discovered the cringe subreddits and found that people were not only constantly discovering new cringe videos, but because of red it's upvote functionality that I could easily find the best ones with minimal effort. Within a few weeks of browsing, I got an idea: why not centralize what's on Reddit into compilations that already exists on YouTube? Throughout the following weeks, I developed the strategy, introduced three things—distinction, quality (as much as you can achieve stealing other people's videos), and quantity—into the cringes genre. It was with that in mind, alongside what would be an attempt to produce a variety of content, that I then went on to create the channel a few weeks later.
Distinction would come in my thumbnails and channel branding. I knew every other YouTube video by smaller YouTubers that got incredible amounts of views use horribly gaudy and eye-catching thumbnails, so that was the very first
2:02 thing I got to. Second, I made an intro with a spelling error in that itself changed multiple times throughout the channel. As the channel evolved over the course of its first two months of existence, I went from using the static cut transit of a lot of other cringe compilations to the more dynamic VHS transitions. It was with the positive reception of those transitions that I decided to make an intro based in the 1980s, then eventually channel art that did the same.
Quality I would get through the consistent introduction of new clips in every single video, limiting video clip lengths to one minute so the viewer could get the most out of them.
Quantity, finally, would come in the form of a consistent Friday upload schedule, yielding a total of 48 videos by the end of that year. The idea was thus to flood the YouTube searches with my videos, give the viewer a reason to subscribe, and make the viewer remember the channel. And despite uploading pretty garbage content for a year that got me nearly 30,000 subscribers in that time frame, eventually the content theft caught up with me and the channel got shut down a total of three times—the third and what I thought would be final time resulting in mass content deletions. Having now made an agreement to stop compilations, I
3:03 was at that point left with an ultimatum: quit YouTube or start something new. There was no way I was going to quit; I enjoyed the YouTube and alt had to offer too much at that point. But the prospect of starting something new and of producing original content were things that I had only attempted in to self-titled cringe commentary videos I'd produced a few months earlier. It was with their positive reception and my general understanding of myself as a cringy YouTuber that I decided to continue where I left off and take cringe videos where mere compilations could not and had commentary to them.
I started watching videos on YouTube for their editing and not for their content. I watched I Hate Everything in box primarily at the time, so they were two of my greatest influences. With gradual work at editing over time alongside tutorials I could find on YouTube, I introduced more complex keyframing and effects. Thus began the introduction of "God Has Left Us" and progressive isms, the first being the successor to the original cringe compilations, in a second the successor to the cringe commentaries, both of which had progressive undertones within them. While first making these was a struggle, I began to enjoy making my own content and having people enjoy my personality and what I had to say
4:05 instead of the cringe clips I used. That change over in my mind led me to want to talk about things and ideas instead of just commentating over other people's videos, and eventually with the video I made on emojis, I did just that, which I succeeded with a video on Oni see on and on leafyishere, and finally on furry YouTubers, although I never really considered them as such. These four, arguably alongside the video I would produced pertaining to leafy utilizing a DS visual elements, constitute the first few video essays I would produce on the channel.
It was after that video that I realized something else: I didn't like the content I was producing. It was crass, juvenile, and in very poor taste. The video on leafyishere allowed me to double my subscriber base in a rather short period of time, and it was that realization that I was now gaining steam on the website that made me question: if I ever were to become a bigger YouTuber, but I want to be known as one for my vulgar comedic humor or one known for something better? I turned to the side of something better, not only because those videos no longer reflected me and my views as an individual, but because I didn't want others thinking that they did either.
5:05 With production of newer video essays, I reworked my writing style to something less vulgar and more palatable, opting for research and well-thought-out opinions instead of cracking jokes the expense of people that probably didn't deserve them to begin with. As I produced more, I gradually made these older videos private. I didn't want them to reflect the image of my channel anymore and was no longer proud of them. The videos I produce now are things that I feel I'll always be able to feel proud of, and that's something that in and of itself I feel proud to say.
I do quite a bit in my spare time—from reading to YouTube to schoolwork to everything in between—and it's from these sources that I now find that I'm always fighting new ideas for videos, whether they be something that's trending on YouTube at the time or something that I feel resonates with me personally. Here's a few of those things that you may find in future videos.
As for my editing now, it's based on Captain Christian style along with boxes and the nerd writers more than anything, along with my own personal style. I developed it simply through observation and recreation of what I could find on the net, and so in a sense I simply taught myself everything I now know, as I'm sure Christian and the nerd writer did as
6:06 well. The style I you simply arose out of that general recreation with the purpose of getting elements on and off screen and finding the most visually pleasing ways of doing that.
The video creation process begins, of course, with the idea. After I have it, I'll research it for a bit until I find enough material to make a script with. Most of the time, because I'm talking about things that I can give an opinion on, the research is pretty mild, as I'm presenting a subjective lens through which I present the actual information. My video on resonance is a good counter example though, so I can explain the research process for that one.
The first thing I did was find the mideast for the song, then converts two text files so I could read them more easily. I organized everything into its basic chords, rewrote everything using these chords, that input their notes into online databases to determine the court names. After that, I looked through the synthesizers used to produce the song for their configurations and made notes of them. After that, I applied my knowledge of music theory to write script in order of simple to complex, going through the basics of the song, then layering on more musical complexity throughout the course of the video.
My writing style is something that I've
7:06 developed on my own without any real inspiration other than my own thoughts, unlike my editing. Once the script is done, I record and edit my narration, then listen to it a few times to get a general conception of how I want to visually represent what I'm listening to. I'll write down some general ideas, then bring the narration into Final Cut Pro, my main editor at the moment, and get to work putting everything together.
Depending on the video, I'll get to work making different visual elements. When it comes to making these 2.5 D image movements, which are something I use a lot in my videos, I'll specifically use Photoshop and Illustrator alongside After Effects. I'll first bring an image into Photoshop and trace out different parts to separate the background and foreground, and depending on the image, either find new elements on Google and replace the gap left by removing the foreground or simply use a combination of photo shops image synthesis tools—from content-aware fill to the clone brush and the Healing Brush tools. I'll then bring the PSD into After Effects, create a camera, then position the pieces of the PSD in 3D space, dolly the camera inward, then render the whole thing out. I'll then combine these elements with pictures, videos, and text I found online in Final Cut, adding a wide variety of
8:07 plugins from Red Giant, Pixel Film Studios, and FX Factory to give things more visual flair. I do all of this on a 2016 MacBook Pro with 8 gigabytes of memory and 1.6 gigahertz of processing power. Everything prior to the Life of Pi video was edited on an HP Envy 5 laptop with the same amount of memory, but 2.6 gigahertz of processing. Despite the decrease in processing speed, editing is, however, markedly faster on my Mac.
The entire video creation process from start to finish I'd estimate takes no less than 80 hours per video. When I'm editing, I'll typically dedicate my entire day to just editing, provided I have the time for it, which means 12 to 15 hours of editing alone. Assuming it takes about one to two weeks of that to make a video, that's anywhere from 84 hours of editing at the minimum to 210 at the maxximum. This is really the reason I don't get to upload too frequently, because if I want the videos to look good, I need to dedicate a lot of time to them. While doing that hasn't exactly allowed me to maintain a solid upload schedule, it's allowed me to gain numerous amounts of subscribers with every upload—I gain 17,000 of you from the residence video alone. And it's with
9:08 the positive reaction of these video essays more so than I ever received making cringe videos that now add 100,000 subscribers I'd like to thank all of you for where I am now it's with that that I'd like to shout out for content creators who I believe deserve far more recognition than they are receiving at the moment the first I'd like to mention is Jayce lat he's been on YouTube for two years more than I have but only has about 2000 subscribers his editing ranges from simple to complex but is always extremely clean his script writing is also fantastic as well the second is Tim the enchanter who helped me some months ago on the vapor wave video and who hasn't stopped producing quality content since he makes incredibly well made psychedelic videos and after effects that in my opinion deserve well over a few hundred views apiece the third is bandit rants whose quality of editing rivals my own in my opinion in its fluidity and use of 3d shapes the fourth is toxicologists who while perhaps lacking in his editing he makes up for in his thorough research and presentation of paranormal matters on the net and with all of that out of the way since so many of you have asked I'll tell you a little bit more about
10:09 myself. I'm currently 17 and I live in the United States. I don't currently have a job besides that of YouTube, if you can call it a job. Being in high school, I'm not really studying anything in particular at the moment, but I will be taking college-level courses in European history, United States government, American literature, and calculus next year. In college, I plan on studying public policy and economics, with hopes of an eventual career in politics or economics in some manner.
Aside from school work and YouTube, I, as said before, do a lot of reading in my spare time. A few people have asked, so I'll recommend Ellison's Invisible Man, Zim's of People's History of the United States, and Cerner's The Ego and His Own, which I'm currently reading, as a few of the favorite books I've read. Aside from reading, I also play the piano, and of course work in Photoshop for pleasure if I feel like it.
People ask a lot of questions also about where all my knowledge comes from, especially in the way of music theory, and I'd just like to say that it's really come from the time I've spent reading about the things that interest me. If I ever have a question, I'll search for it immediately and tend to search for an answer until I'm satisfied with what I found. When it comes to music theory, I've taken piano
11:10 lessons for about five years and still do so in that time my teacher who himself has been classically trained was able to teach me quite a bit about the ins and outs of the theory musically people had a ton of questions as well about my favorite artists and genres so I'd like to briefly say that I do have a playlist of some of the music I like on my channel which you can find under the playlist section you can find a lot of my favorite artist genres and everything of that sort there in the way of the other sorts of media I tend to like some of my favorite TV shows are Rick and Morty stranger things and of course black mirror movies being among the many you can find on this list finally a lot of people asked me about my opinions on YouTube and the world in general I like to consider myself someone who likes to think about things concretely not based on notions or ideas but on things that we can demonstrate and it's horribly pretentious as that sounds it was because of that that I had drifted towards agnosticism away from Roman Christianity around the age of 15 as in my opinion God is something that we inherently cannot demonstrate it was also because of this that around the same time I became increasingly critical of both capitalism and u.s. representative democracy and it is now
12:12 two years later that I find myself sam'l taneous ly critical of socialism as well. The fullness of my political and economic beliefs can be found on my blog, but for the sake of curtness, I'll say it's closest to the French philosopher proud dull system of mutualism, where in the economy doesn't seek wealth or distribution in the case of socialism, nor does it seek the extraction of surplus labor in capitalism, but rather seeks to give each man his just due for the work he has performed. It's because of this that I'm also very critical of the state of YouTube at the moment, as it is my opinion that those who produce the videos are those that make the website possible by producing the actual product that is placed on the market to generate revenue. If I could make one change to the website, I would make it more accountable to the people actually performing this labor, as despite the fact I spent two hundred hours producing my video on resonance—a video nearing 300 thousand views—I'm not allowed to monetize it, as someone else's intellectual property is very briefly used within it.
Other than that, my experience on this website has been fantastic, and I really do enjoy producing videos for it and for all of you. And so with that, I'd like to thank
13:12 you all again for a hundred thousand subscribers, and here's to whatever more may come. This is Mr. Amazing, thanks for watching. [Music]
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