HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! :-D | NEW VIDEO!!!

And so the New Year has come. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

With that, of course I had to do a small video commemorating the new year, so here you go! :-D

Hope you all have a wonderful 2014! :-)

Creating Serial Content (and not the murderous kind) | Youtube Advice!!

And Again we are back with Youtube Advice!!! This is where I talk about the advice I have gathered over time from personal experience and from official Youtube staff. This time, we are talking about regular/ series content.

Let's get started!!

As I have posted a video a while ago called "ProfKranc Talks" I think this is something I should talk about, or at least explain my attempt at creating a regular show on my channel.

Something you will notice on many of the larger channels on Youtube is that they post a lot of similar content, or have a "show" per se.

An example of this is Tobuscus.

Tobuscus is a famous Youtube personality for his over the top videos that span over several pieces of regular content.

In this case, there a multiple "shows" he has.
This includes:

TobyGames: "featuring Let's Plays of popular games with commentary"
Literal Trailers: "Trailer's with Tobuscus parodying the song with singing lyrics alongside it"
Lazy Vlogs: "Long Unedited vlog videos"
Tobuscus Adventures: "Animated shorts of Tobuscus and his random adventures"
Tobuscus Songs: "Songs that Tobuscus posts every so often usually parodying something popular"

As you can see, he has a lot of these. In fact I think I may have also missed a few small series on his channel but you get my point.

People go to his channel not only for his funny videos, but because he has this serial content, we can say they go back to his channel because of the fact they know there will be a continuing of content they like. But there is the case that what if you have serial content that one batch of viewers like, and another batch don't?

Now you could say that this is channel specific and that's true. People have separate channels for different types of content. People have gaming channels, vlog channels, sketch channels, etc. Well you could say there is a kind of a common sense among creators that they separate their content so their viewers don't get bombarded with content they don't like. However there is no rule for this.

Fine Bros

For example, recently TheFineBros who run the successful React Series have moved their drama/ comedy music series "MyMusic" to their main channel.

Originally MyMusic was completely on their own channel, but I think it is clear that because their main channel has more subscribers and garners more views than their MyMusic channel, they decided to move it to their main channel because there it would get more attention.
I'm going slightly off track here, but this is my opinion on the situation of creating serial content for your channel:

I think in order to maintain an audience you need to make sure you create similar content or content that your target audience will like, otherwise if they are bombarded with alien content they will unsubscribe and you will loose a viewer. However if you are creating a show, you need to make sure it is regular otherwise it will not serve the purpose that it was created for:

Serial content is to create entertaining, regular and similar content that will attract and keep a viewer subscribed to your channel.

This is something we have to point out. That when creating serial content, you have to make sure it is engaging and that it is something you can create regularly. If you are thinking of making big blockbuster short films every week with a full time job, you may have to rethink your release schedule.

This of course doesn't mean when you create "Serial Content" that it has to be a show, it could just be things of a similar nature. It doesn't even have to be classified as a show, it's just a word I'm using to describe ProfKranc Talks as that is what it is.

You have to realise that if you are going to commit to something, you have to have the time to do it. Not only that, but make sure that it is something that people will like and so far that is what ProfKranc Talks will be.

The point behind creating ProfKranc Talks is that it is an quick and easy way to create regular content, engage with my audience and also allow me another outlet on the channel apart from comedy and horror videos with the odd AMV.

But anyway, this was really just a rant about my opinion behind creating serial content. I think my channel needed something regular in order to keep viewers here apart from my comedy and drama videos.
That and it's easy to create, which gives me more time to create better content for my sketches and so on.

Thanks for reading everyone, I hope this helps. ProfKranc here and I will see you next time :-).

Oh, and make sure that you are creating something other than Let's Plays. Unless you have a really original take on it, with the situation Gaming channels are in at the moment with this recent copyright lockdown I don't think its the best idea. That and there are enough gaming channels out there right now, I would love to see something new like.... an online drama or something.

But again, that is just my opinion, if you are reading this and you have a Youtube channel, please send me a link either in the comments or in the Blog's Contact me page. I would love to see what you guys do! :-)

Oh and there is something I haven't done for a while.......

RANDOM VIDEO TIME!!!!

Mistakes are made | PROFKRANC TALKS!! | NEW VIDEO!!

Today, ProfKranc talks to everyone about the matter of making mistakes! In video format!

Check it out here!






I did kinda repeat myself a lot in this video, but I'm proud of it none the less.

Anyway, I'll be posting another post in relevance to this video sometime next week, so stay tuned! :-D

FALLING.MOV BEHIND THE SCENES

Another behind the scenes post! YAY :-D.

Okay so for anyone who hasn’t seen the video, take a look below as this probably won’t make sense if you haven’t watched it.

Watched the video? Good, now let’s get down to business. 

The Initial Spark

As Halloween approached, I decided that I should do something to celebrate this brilliant holiday of goblins, ghosts and ghouls with a little horror video. 

So as this video says in the title, the video was based solely on a creepypasta. Literally I was reading the creepypasta word for word in this video. The entire video is just a dramatisation of it. You may not realise this, but there are a lot of creepypasta channels out there. 

If you google “Creepypasta Youtube channel”, probably the first youtube channel to come up would be “MrCreepypasta” which is essentially someone just reading the creepypasta with some pictures and some music.  

As you may know from my channel, I like dramatising things. So I decided, why not make a simple and live action version of this creepypasta.

By the way, if you don’t know what a creepypasta is, it’s essentially a story made on the internet to intentionally scare the reader.

If you want to know more about it, click here.

So, what is so behind the scenes about this article? Well, even though the spark itself isn’t that big of a deal because I literally just did what a lot of hollywood studious do: take an already successful piece of literature and make it into something people can watch rather than read.

Well, there is the how that I can explain for this video. This means showing you this effect:

Falling into darkness effect

This effect, in other words:

This effect consisted of one main trick.

Green screen.

I have realised I use green screen for a lot of my effects! I guess that’s a pro tip.

Pro Tip: Get a Green screen.

Wait I’m not a pro, so we’ll need to call it something else that’s similar….

Prof Tip: Get a Green screen.

Okay, so What I did first was film a blank plate. This was pretty much just this for 5 seconds: 

After that, I then put the green screen in with the exact same lighting (to make it look the same as the blank slate) and then filmed me doing the actions. Like so: 

In doing this, I have now been able to separate the two assets of the actor doing the actions and the background. This allows me some creative freedom in what I can do with it. There is another way of doing this which includes a lot of masking, but green screen is less time consuming and so much easier.

So anyway, I brought both of these assets into my editing software (I used Final Cut Pro X) and placed on asset on top of another. 

After using the blank slate as the base layer, I put the green screen footage over the top of it and then keyed it.
It should look like this on your editing timeline:

This made the actor seem like he was in the room. That was step 1 done, step 2 was making the background fall away and leaving him in darkness. 

So how I did it was I took the base layer (background/ blank slate) and then added 2 keyframes. One keyframe when it was normal and one when it was at 0%, essentially it had disappeared. The two keyframes allow the transition of the fall into darkness gradual. Rather than the background disappearing, we now have it speeding away and getting smaller behind the actors head.

Upon this, we have essentially got the effect. One thing is though, it looks very blocky. Like literally it is a square getting smaller. Now if this is what you want to go for, thats it for you. Congrats you have made the effect!

But if you want to go a bit further, add either a feather mask or a vignette on your base layer footage and adjust it to when the layer gets smaller. This give it a smoother edge and doesn’t make it look as blocky. 

Now just slap some sound effects on there and boom, got yourself the falling into darkness effect.

Thanks for reading! See you on the next post!