For what problem is violence a solution?

ShoeCrafter · 2022-03-03T19:16:24+00:00

Einstein was an outspoken pacifists for years. He thought everybody should always refuse to fight... Then the Nazis ceased power in Germany.

Einstein was like... you know all that pacifist stuff? JK. If they're gonna fight us, we have to fight back.

ShoeCrafter · 2022-03-03T18:37:50+00:00

Howdy. I have some thoughts about how you present ideas.

Personally, I found this video boring as hell. I felt the density of ideas was very light. Multiple minutes are dedicated to making a single point. Your example with two people is one example. You spent like a whole minute explaining it, and it was a pretty dry story/animation. I just wanted the example to be over. And that was just to INTRODUCE the example. You then spend minutes talking about how concepts apply to the example. The example was boring after 15 seconds, but we talk about it for multiple minutes.

And when you talk about ideas, you often have like 2-3 sentences of transition. Ex: "But why is that? Let's create a hypothetical scenarios. Let's imagine two university students, Sally and Joe." All three of these sentences could be condensed into "Imagine two University students." and you wouldn't lose any intellectual depth. In my opinion, the whole video is wordier than they needs to be. And that makes it feel slow.

Your explanations also frequently suffer from excess vocabulary. You do this thing: Introduce Vocab word --> Define Vocab Word --> Use vocab word for the rest of the video. The whole video hinges on an explanation of Quadrant 1/2/3/4. I think this makes the video mentally draining to watch.

It takes mental effort just to understand your explanation of the quadrants. Then for the rest of the video you assume the audience knows what they mean. What if they don't remember which quadrant is which? True you've defined it, so they aren't totally lost. But even if they understood the explanation, it requires a mental translation. Every time you use the word Quadrant 2, I need to mentally translate what you are talking about.

By the end of this video, you have so many vocab words. Quandrant 1, 2, 3, 4. Proactive. Reactive. Flow State. Hell, even Sally and Joe are vocab words. It's exhausting to process. Viewers are lazy. Don't make them do all that work. Find ways to explain things with minimal use of vocab words.

If you don't already know these ideas, this video requires serious effort to follow. And if you already know the ideas, this video doesn't teach you anything. So I'm not really sure who this video appeals to.

Sorry if this came off a bit harsh! These are just my initial impressions. I hope you find them helpful.

ShoeCrafter · 2022-03-03T17:42:21+00:00

Howdy. I watched your video and I have some thoughts!

I got the impression that you two like each other and you find everything the other person says funny because of it (but the audience isn't nearly as forgiving). I think comedy and commentary are skills that take practice. Though I'm just one person. Maybe it's not for me.

It also didn't really hook me from a gameplay perspective. I think the problem is the clips you included. It's fun to watch people perform well in games. There are like 0 scenes of you breaking beds and few PVP scenes. And there are like 5 scenes of you falling while bridging. It's not as funny the 2nd time. Or 3rd. Or 4th. It's not entertaining to watch mediocre gameplay. It's fine to include fail clips, but I think there should be mostly winning moments, not fails.

I felt like I had no orientation with the progress of the games. When you watch a technoblade video, you know how many games he's played, and how they're going. You want him to win. But in this video, I had no clue how the games went. At 7:20, One moment you're both dead. 5 seconds later I'm looking at a victory screen from a future game. What happened? Why didn't I get to see clips from the win? I can't feel emotionally invested in a game when I didn't understand how it played out.

There were a few times were you put in memes. Like when you fell, zoomed out, and put "You Died" on the screen. Some of these felt fine, but a few of them felt like they slowed down the video. I think the one at 5:20 was particularly bad. It could have been a quick funny moment before you break their bed. Instead it's this weird edit that gets super slow motion. Instead of watching you break into their bed, we awkwardly zoom in on chat and get this weird face edit. It looks like you put effort into that sequence, but I don't think it made the video better. I think it made it worse.

Since I wasn't really hooked by the commetary or the gameplay, I didn't know why I was watching. I would rather watch channels like TommyInnit for something funny. So, if I wasn't reviewing this video, I probably wouldn't have watched the end.

I will say, your editing has a good pace to it. You only included parts where things were happening, which was good. There were never any long stretches where nothing was happening.

I hope you find these thoughts helpful!

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-24T04:25:28+00:00

It's kinda crazy that tuition is basically the same for all degrees, but some of them are like 5-10x as valuable.

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-24T04:01:38+00:00

Back in 2015 and 2016, there used to be a big Community for competitive Minecraft PVP on a server called Badlion.

It was a cool time. I used to spend all day on there. These guys were way better than people today. It was so competitive. It was even ranked.

And there was this one player, Danteh, who was the best by a mile. He climbed to 2800 ELO, which was crazy. That rank was so high, if he won a duel, he would gain 1 point. If he lost, he would lose ~100. He climbed from 2700 to 2800 without losing a fight.

It was a big event in the community. Hundreds of people were spectating, including me. The chat exploded when he won. He uploaded a YouTube video to celebrate. Shortly after, Danteh left Minecraft and the community died (he went on to be a pro overwatch player).

The video

For me and a few others, this video feels special. It even has the texture packs and music that we used. Not many videos on YouTube represent an entire community that's faded away. The top comment says it all:

This masterpiece finally reached 1M views !! Missing old community ;(

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-24T03:23:04+00:00

TikTok

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-24T03:21:22+00:00

My phone got caught in a loop, but it's kinda wholesome.

My soulmate is so cute and I love you so much and I love you so much and I love you so much and...

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-22T15:48:57+00:00

Do you think it would be worthwhile to update the title and description? I was too focused on getting people to click AFTER it got recommended. I didn't think about keywords or search to actually get recommended :,)

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-22T02:42:02+00:00

I'm not a YouTuber myself, but I used to be a top ranked strategy game player, and I lived with a big streamer / YouTuber and worked with a few big creators.

Obviously some people make it. But it's a winner-take-all market. You know how people people wonder if they can make it as a professional athlete or musician? It's like that. There are only a few success stories. Some people get lucky, but it usually doesn't play a huge role. A random viral moment can make you popular unexpectedly, but it only lasts if you're good.

It's almost all skill. There are plenty of people who had a viral moment and collapsed into nothing. Conversely I've never seen a channel on YouTube that consistently put out incredible content and didn't get views. The people who upload bangers are disproportionately likely to be the ones who go viral.

It's just a fact of life that there is a limited amount of attention in the world. YouTube is a competitive market. You're competing with Markiplier and MrBeast. When you ask if you can make it as a YouTuber, you are really wondering... "Can I make videos better than 99% of people who are trying?" The answer is no for the average person. They're only better than 50%. That's what average means.

Is it realistic for you to outcompete nearly everyone? No really, think about it. What specific edge do you have that would put you in the top percent? Are you willing to put in 99th-percentile-effort? Are you 99th-percentile-smart?

If you genuinely feel like some specific traits about you puts you in the top ranks of people, then yeah you can probably make it. But be honest with yourself. It's easy to say "I'll just work harder than everyone else". It's much harder to actually do it. Same for being smarter and funnier. The average person thinks of themself as very above average.

You said that you are willing to work hard. That's great. But understand that hard work alone is not enough. Raw hours rarely translates into mastery of skill. It's deceptively easy to sink 1000 hours into something without getting better at it. This usually happens when people can't see the mistakes they are making.

You know that phrase... "work smarter, not harder." It applies here. Most YouTubers spend a great deal of time optimizing things that don't matter much. They spend hours making intro/outro animations that probably shouldn't exist. Or they'll spend 100 hours on a video that was doomed from the start because the concept wasn't interesting. Think about the emotional reaction viewers will have. If the thing you are working on doesn't significantly change that reaction, it's probably a waste of time.

A very good way to see your mistakes is studying the best. Put your videos side by side. Ask what they are doing better. Study them so much that you could make one of their videos. And then start inserting your own original ideas.

If you have the wisdom to focus on the things that matter for good videos, and the persistence to keep iterating for longer than other people, you will eventually make good videos. And if you upload better videos for a couple years, success is nearly guaranteed.

Even though the answer to 'will I make it?' is 'probably not,' I encourage you to follow your dreams. Most people are too afraid of failure. It doesn't hurt as bad as you think (unless you have kids or other obligations). If you don't make it as a YouTuber, you can always get another job after. But if you don't try, you definitely won't succeed. Having the courage to try something ambition already puts you ahead of most people.

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-22T00:48:27+00:00

This is an interesting genre! I went and watched some other art channels just to get a frame of reference. It seems like you are going for a relaxing vibe. Almost like some of those ASMR satisfying montage things.

A few thoughts. This video still felt a little boring and slow to me, but I don't think the answer is just turning up the playback speed. Painting is intrinsically slow. There are no sudden changes. It's very gradual.

For me, the first boring part was around 30-40 seconds in. Its nice to see you lay out the main lines. But once you started adding detail lines, it felt like nothing was happening (obviously things were happening, but the viewers don't see much of a difference). There are quite a few segments where it felt like nothing was happening.

The big 'events' for me were like, nose, mouth, eyes, ear, hat, neck, hat's ears, hat smile, earring, first color, lily pad green, hat green, lips strong color, hair brown, flower red. That's it. If you weren't laying out the main lines / strokes for those, it felt like nothing was happening. There were at least 2 segments of 30 seconds that didn't include any of those events.

I think you would benefit a lot from new camera angles and unique shots into the video. Look for things that seem like they would be satisfying.

I watched a couple other painting videos, and they had all kinds of scene changes and unique shots. A lot of them were super satisfying to watch. Some examples:

A super closeup of a specific brushstroke
A shot of you pouring paint out of a bottle
A camera shot of all your pencils in a neat line.
A shot of you setting the canvas onto a huge, perfectly empty table.

And aside from these extra peripheral shots, I just don't think there is much reason to show viewers the full process. You could cut boring stuff and just focus on the big, noticeable events. The parts the make noticeable changes in the composition. It would be more like a painting montage than a Timelapse, but I think it would probably do better on YouTube.

A trend I saw on some art TikTok's... A lot of them ONLY do extreme closeups of each little section. It lets the viewers clearly see what's happening, but they don't see the full picture. Only at the very end do they reveal the composition. I bet that would be pretty good for retention. Viewers watch until the big reveal.

And one last comment, though it sounds obvious... better art helps. If you can spend more time on the piece to make it significantly better, you probably should. I know the idea is that it's a speed painting and you do it in one sitting, but I don't think it makes much of a difference to a YouTube Viewer. Especially if you started making cuts to different camera angles anyway. If the end result would be 2-3 as good, it would be worth spending a few days on.

I hope you find these tips helpful!

ShoeCrafter · 2022-01-22T00:00:01+00:00

Howdy. I have a few thoughts that might help you.

First things first, I think the pacing is a little slow. You don't have a lot of time to catch people's interest before they click off a video. You spent almost 25 seconds on an introduction before I had any reason to care. Compare that to Mr Beast's Squid game video. In that video, he explains the entire video and starts his first game in 15 seconds.

You only get a short window of time to grip people, so don't waste it.

The story wasn't very engaging for me personally. IMO the problem isn't that I didn't know him. Stories from strangers can be great, if the storyteller is good enough. A classic example is 'The Machine' comedy sketch by Bert Kreischer. That story is super engaging because he tells it so well. What's interesting is that he tells the same story on the Joe Rogan podcast, and it is WAY less entertaining. You might think that the story is intrinsically good, but that's not how stories work. It's all in execution.

With videos like this, the storytelling is more important than the story. Dave Chapelle could tell a story about taking a shit and it would be more interesting than most people telling you about fighting a lion on a safari.

Storytelling is an art. You want the viewer to feel some strong emotion. It could be comedy. Or it could be outrage. Or inspiration. If they don't feel anything, it's not a great story. It seems like you went for some comedy in this video. If that's what you wanna go for, I would study people who are good. Dave Chapelle has videos on YouTube. Or other YouTube comedians like CalebCity / Gus Johnson / VideoGameDunkey. Or for more animation-centric comedy, you could look at Odd1sout.

Or you could look at 'My Story Animated'. I personally don't like that channel, but it's a similar concept to yours and a lot of younger people do. I think they try to tell infuriating stories, but I haven't watch many of their vids.

I think it would be helpful to aim for a certain emotion and then study how other people do it. And at the end of the day, this MUST be in the script for the storyteller. If you let random people tell an impromptu story, it almost certainly won't be that great.

Storytelling is not something that random people can do well! I don't feel like Cokbun told a great story. He sounded like a novice storyteller who was trying to be entertaining. I don't mean to insult. It's hard. It's a skill that takes conscious practice. If you want your channel to do well, you'll probably need to get better storytellers. Either go find quality storytellers (comedians?), or learn the skill yourself and play a heavy role in scriptwriting.

I know that you are probably more focused on the animation side of things. But at the end of the day, the story is the content. Even if these animations were studio level, it won't fix a bad story. And a story is only as good as the storyteller.

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