Idea Generation

During the idea generating process, we came up with the idea of creating a documentary about YouTube. I created two different mind maps and a mood board in order to bring my ideas to life

We are going to go to London for our production day as we will be able to gain access to the YouTube Space. After looking into how we will produce this, we decided we would separate the documentary into different sections. These sections include:

• The Title Sequence – Edited by me
• The History of YouTube – Edited by me
• Can YouTube be a Career? – Edited by Dan
• The Influence on Kids – Edited by me
• The Positives & Negatives of YouTube – Edited by Cheye
• The Trip to London and the Interviews – Edited by Cheye and Dan
• Conclusion – Our opinions – Edited by Dan

We have assigned each other different sections for the edit to make sure we have each produced a sufficient amount. My sections are the title sequence, the history of YouTube and the influence on kids. I will be creating the title sequence and the history of YouTube section in Adobe After Effects and the influence on kids section in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Project Title

Now that my group and I have decided on creating a documentary about YouTube, we need to pick a title. Our title needs to be captivating as it’s the first thing people will hear and see when our documentary is completed.

We decided on the title: YouTube – Beyond the Screen. The reason we have titled it this is because we’re going to be looking into YouTube on a deeper level. Instead of just watching the content provided on the platform, we’re going to look into the statistics, talking with YouTubers, and researching into the background of the company, essentially going beyond what we see.

USP – Unique Selling Point

As we want our project to stand out from everyone else’s we need a unique selling point. The unique selling point to our chosen project is that we are travelling to London to gather evidence and information from the company itself. Our documentary is going to include interviews with people who work there and people who use the platform as a source of income, which I believe no one else is going to be able to do.

Target Audience

Although our documentary will revolve heavily on YouTube and children, our target audience isn’t children. We want our documentary to be serious and informative, which is why our documentary will be aimed at adults. We wanted to target an older audience because they’re the ones who are going to be curious about what their children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews, brothers/sisters etc are watching. I’d say our target audience would be anywhere between the ages of 21 – 50. I’ve chosen this large of an age gap because that’s where adults with younger family members are in age. Having a more mature audience means we will need to be careful to not lose their interest when discussing YouTube. The topic of YouTube can wander over the line of being too puerile, depending on how we go about it. We will need to script our documentary strategically to appeal to the mature demographic.

Pre-Production

In my group I have been assigned the role of creating the pre production paperwork.

Location Permission

As our main location will be the YouTube Space in London, we aren’t required to complete a consent form as any people who have access to the building are allowed to film on the premises. To be granted access to the YouTube space you’re required to have 10,000 YouTube subscribers or more. Luckily for us, Dan has surpassed this amount of subscribers which allows us to sign up to use the YouTube space.

We have acquired a time and date to access the YouTube space and it has all been confirmed.

As you can see above, we will be going to the YouTube space on April 17th 2019 and will arrive at 10:00am when it opens.

In addition to booking the YouTube Space, we have purchased bus tickets for London. We will be leaving at 12:25am from Swansea Quadrant Bus Station and will arrive at London Victoria Coach Station at approximately 5:00am.

Resource / Equipment List

As majority of our filming will take place in London, we need to ensure we have all of the right equipment for this to happen. As you can see below, I have created an equipment list to make sure we have everything we need ready for production.

Location Recce

Scenes Filmed Here

The scenes that will be filmed here are our interviews. We plan on using the YouTube Space Cafe as a place to find the YouTubers and use the location to interview them. Additionally, we will be using the YouTube Space and that area of London to capture b-roll.

Potential Hazards

The only potential health and safety hazards at this particular location would be anyone tripping over loose wires.

Risk Assessment

Script

Initially, we wrote our sections of the script separately and then brought them together in a Word document. I then wrote up the script in the correct format.

Below you can click the link to view the script as a whole.

To distinguish my work from my group, below I have wrote up exactly what I scripted in a word document.

Storyboard

Before I can move on to my production, I need to create a storyboard in order to visualise my documentary. My entire storyboard has been sketched and constructed in Adobe Photoshop.

Below you can see my production storyboard.

Interview Questions – Bird Keeper Toby

The first interview we plan on recording for the documentary will be the one via webcam with YouTuber Bird Keeper Toby. We have come up with a list of questions together specifically designed for Toby and his channel.

1. Why did you start making videos on YouTube?
2. How difficult is it to earn a living on the platform?
3. How many hours do you put into creating videos every week?
4. What don’t you like about YouTube? Or something you think could be improved on.
5. Why did you decide to make your channel based on Pokémon?
6. What’s the hardest part of making videos?
7. Do negative comments affect you?
8. Would you say YouTube is harder or easier than a regular 9-5 job?
9. Would you recommend YouTube as a career path for future generations?
10. You’ve been to official Pokemon and YouTube events. How do these opportunities arise?

Interview Questions – YouTube Space

Since we aren’t able to know who will be at the YouTube Space the day we’re attending, we have come up with a range of questions similar to the ones we asked Toby, but with no specific person or channel in mind.

1. What kind of videos do you make? 
2. Why did you start making videos on YouTube? 
3. What’s the hardest part of making videos? 
4. Would you recommend YouTube as a career path for future generations? 

Call Sheet

Budget

Production Equipment Cost

As you can see there is no cost required in regards to production equipment.

Production Day Items Cost

As you can see, the total cost for our production day is £198.75. This equates to £66.25 each.

Post-Production Equipment Cost

As you can see, our Post-Production equipment requires no cost.

Contributors

The main contributor to this documentary is Toby Hill, also known as Bird Keeper Toby. We will be interviewing Toby over webcam and have planned this with Toby ahead of time.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UComJjpEGvbavdpH7zpNZRxg

The other contributors will be the YouTubers we interview at the YouTube Space. At this moment in time, we don’t know who these will be.

Production Day Itinerary / Schedule

When we arrive in London, we have five hours to spare until the YouTube Space opens, so during this time we will be getting our oyster cards which is needed to travel across London. We will then start taking B-Roll in different areas of London, as well as photographs. We hope to take B-Roll of popular tourist destinations as this will distinguish our location prominently in the documentary. To ensure no footage is lost, during our coffee and food breaks we will be backing up the files to an external hard drive using my laptop.

We will be going to the YouTube Space at 10:00am. During our time there we will be filming the exterior and interior of the building, we will also interview the staff there. We hope to find YouTubers in the building to ask a few questions, but this can’t be guaranteed as we have no idea who will be there.

Once we have finished up in the YouTube Space we will go to Leicester Square and attempt to interview the public. Again, we will review our footage and back it up when we go for a food break.

Below you can see my itinerary for the day:

Production

During production, we took a camera specifically for photography. Below you can see a contact sheet of these images.

Contact Sheet

Behind the Scenes Footage

The footage below is the behind the scenes we captured on the day we filmed the interviews.

London Production Day Contributors

Before production day we weren’t sure who we would be interviewing in London, we were aware that this was a risk but it was definitely a risk we were willing to take. We managed to interview four YouTubers at the YouTube Space.

The first one being John from MusicCollegeTV.

https://www.youtube.com/user/MusicCollegeTV

The second one being Turkish from AFTV.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBTy8j2cPy6zw68godcE7MQ

The next one being Ty also from AFTV.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBTy8j2cPy6zw68godcE7MQ

The last one being Sammy Paul, who not only runs his own channel, but works behind the scenes on other channels.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ICOEPRproductions

Audio

We will be recording the narration for the documentary using a professional studio mic. This will ensure the audio is clear and sounds professional. Dan has been assigned the task of editing the audio. We started the audio process by booking out the college studio. Unfortunately, we kept having issues with the studio that day and we were left with very little time to record the narration. Due to it being the end of the year and a lot of people needing to use the studio, we weren’t able to book out the studio for another session, at least not in the time frame we needed. To overcome this issue, we decided we would record the narration at Dans house as he has a professional microphone. At this point this was our best option. The next day we went over to record the narration and it sounded really good. As Dan is head of audio, he was responsible for editing the audio. His chosen software to do this was ‘Audacity’. Dan used noise reduction and equalisation features within Audacity so we could get the best sound possible. These features helped reduce any unwanted background noise to ensure our narration was clear.

When we had sequenced all of our parts into Premiere Pro, we used the ‘audio clip mixer’ feature to make sure all the audio throughout the documentary was relatively on the same level. This level was -6 decibels.

Post-Production

Footage Arrangement

Now that production is completed, we need to make sure all of the clips are backed up. In this process we have gone through all of the footage and put the footage into the following categories. We have all saved the entirety of the footage to our individual hard drives. The footage is in enclosed in this ‘YouTube documentary’ folder.

As you can see below, we have arranged the footage into different sub folders. We went through each clip and decided what we did and didn’t like. The bad footage and the bloopers resides in one folder, the good footage in another and the interview clips with Bird Keeper Toby in the last folder.

Inside the ‘Toby Interview’ folder we have two other folders. The two folders titled ‘Camera 1’ and ‘Camera 2’ hold the two different angles of footage we recorded when we interviewed Toby. We needed all of this footage so we can extract the audio from them during the editing process, which is why there’s no bad footage folder for that section.

The good footage folder includes everything we believe to be useful to the documentary. There are a lot of clips in there and we wanted to leave our options open for the edit. This footage includes our interviews at the YouTube Space as well as B-Roll in London.

Title Sequence

After attempting to create the polaroid animation for the title sequence, I decided to change it up. I wanted to create an animation that was more professional looking, but keeping with my original idea.

Since my title sequence required a lot of work, I decided to film myself talking about how I created it from start to finish.

Below you can view this video.

Section Titles Animations

For each of the different sections, to be able to distinguish mine and my groups work from each others, I decided to create title cards which would say what section it was. I made sure these title cards matched the original title from the beginning in the title sequence in order to keep consistency throughout the documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlIIijS65uo

To create these title cards I used Adobe After Effects.

I began by creating a new composition in After Effects. I then imported a screen glitch video into the composition.

This is the free stock footage I used to create the effect.

Once the stock footage was in the timeline, I turned off the visibility and the audio.

I then created two text layers which said one of the section titles. In this case, it was ‘The History of YouTube”

I added an adjustment layer to the top of my timeline.

After I added the adjustment layer, I went into ‘effects and presets’ section and typed in ‘displacement map’. I dragged this effect onto the adjustment layer.

Next, I went over to the effects controls panel for the displacement map effect and made it react to the screen glitch stock footage.

As you can see in the image below, the text has started to glitch.

If I wanted my text to just have a simple glitch, I could leave it exactly like this, but glitch text usually includes RGB colour glitching.

I selected both of my text tools, right clicked and selected ‘pre-compose’ so they became one layer.

To start adding the colour effect I selected my text layer and dragged on the ‘set channels’ effect.

I then duplicated my text layer two times and renamed them all ‘red’ ‘green’ and ‘blue’.

The next thing to do was to select ‘toggle switches and modes’ and change the blending mode on each text layer to ‘screen’.

Selecting the each of the text options, I went back up to ‘effects controls’ and turned off the other two colours. So, for the text named ‘red’ I turned off the blue and green channels. For the text named green I turned off the red and blue channels and for the text named blue I turned off the red and green channels.

I then went to the text named red, brought up the position selection and moved the position to the right.

Doing this gave me the coloured glitch effect I wanted.

As this effect was used on all of the titles, instead of repeating the whole edit again, I duplicated the composition. I then dragged the duplicated composition into a new composition and changed the text to the next section name. I did this for each section and it saved me a lot of time.

History of YouTube Animations

Map Animation

The History of YouTube section begins with an animation of San Mateo California.

In order to do this animation, I went to google maps and took four screenshots of the San Mateo map. The first screenshot zoomed in to an area I liked the look of, the second one being that same area but zoomed out, the third one being a different area zoomed out, and the fourth being that same area zoomed in.

Once I had my screenshots, I created a new composition in Adobe After Effects and imported my screenshots.

Once the composition was created, I imported the first and the second screenshot. I put the first screenshot on the bottom of the timeline and put the second one above it. I then used the scale tool to match the screenshots up. Something that was very helpful was turning down the opacity on the second screenshot to align them both accurately so you couldn’t see the edges.

I then added a camera layer and a null object.

I needed to add the null object and link the two layers to it so I could move them both without disrupting the position I originally aligned them into.

I then used the position tool to move the two screenshots (now the null object) over so I could put in the next two screenshots and align them up properly as well.

I made all of the screenshots 3D and linked the last two screenshots to the null object as well. Making the layers 3D will allow me to animate movements.

Using the camera layer, I was able to zoom out at the beginning of the map. To do this I needed to create keyframes. Pressing P on my keyboard opened up the ‘position’ selection, the stopwatch to the left is how you create your first keyframe.

The first keyframe created is where it started to zoom out. I put this in a few seconds into the timeline and not at the beginning so the viewer gets to see the area before it zooms out. To actually create the zoom, I turned down the numbers located next to the position.

I then added an effect called ‘Easy Ease’ to this keyframe so the animation has a nice flow to it. To do this I clicked on the keyframe and went into the Keyframe Assistant section and selected the easy ease, this then turns the diamond icon into an hourglass.

I then selected the position setting on the null object to create the keyframes of the map moving over to the other part of the map.

I created the keyframes to my liking and added the easy ease effect again.

As you can see below the position of the map has moved over in line with the start of the null object (the red box)

Once I had finished animating the movements, to make the sequence more realistic I added in some clouds and placed them at different parts of the animation.

As this animation is distinguishing where YouTube began, the map itself doesn’t really tell you where it is. Where the animation is finishing, I added in a map marker icon and the city name.

If you notice in the finished product, the map marker pops up from the bottom, in order to do this I needed to to move the anchor point from the centre to the bottom.

I used the anchor point tool to do this.

I then used the scale option on the map marker icon to start key-framing when I wanted the map marker to pop up.

I scaled the marker to not be there originally, and then the first keyframe is where it begins to pop up. The last keyframe is how big I wanted it to stay.

I did the same to the “San Mateo CA” text that I wrote in.

Another small detail in this map marker is the subtle bounce. In order to create this bounce, I went into the expression section of the map marker in the timeline.

I then went to google and found the expression I needed to create this bounce. As you can see below, I copied and pasted the expression from google as it requires a lot of detail and advanced After Effects terminology.

After adding this bounce it made the entire animation look that much better and overall gave it a more professional look.

Date Change Animation

After my map animation in the history of YouTube section there is an animation that shows the date changing in February. I created this animation using After Effects.

To begin with, I created a new composition.

I then used the rectangle tool to create a shape layer.

I made the shape layer white by selecting the fill option.

Once the layer was in the timeline, I went into the ‘layer styles’ section and selected ‘drop shadow’.

Within this selection, I made the drop shadow black, then adjusted the opacity so it was low and then changed the distance and size of the shadow.

The next thing I did was add another shape layer, this layer is going to act as the top of my calendar.

Once I had my calendar shape, I started to add in text.

I then added a solid layer to change the colour of the background to grey. This will make the white part of my calendar stand out more.

Obviously this isn’t an animation yet. I need to get this to go up to 14. I then duplicated my composition 13 times and selected each of them.

I then went into each of these compositions and changed the numbers to the next number needed.

After the numbers were changed I added them all to one timeline.

Once in the timeline, I adjusted the lengths of each and made sure none of them overlapped to get a seamless edit.

I wanted the 14th February date to stand out as that’s the one that’s important. On that number in the timeline, I used the scale selection to key-frame it zooming in to the calendar.

The Influence on Kids Animations

YouTube Page Animation

In this section, I created an animation by constructing an image that resembled the YouTube page when a video is playing. I used Adobe Photoshop to begin with and took the edited image into Adobe After Effects to animate.

I used this edit 8 times in the documentary for visuals for different videos. I created the general idea and animation of one in After Effects and then duplicated the composition to add in the different videos and titles each time, this sped up the process of creating 8 similar animations massively.

This was the page I created in Adobe Photoshop.

As you can see, this page resembles the actual YouTube page when a video is playing.

The next step was to create a new project in After Effects. I began by creating a new composition and I imported the YouTube page edit into it.

I then imported the video I needed into the timeline and placed it above the YouTube page edit. I scaled this image down to fit in the box.

The next thing I did was added all of the text to make this appear more realistic. I used my research on these videos to wrote in the usernames and video names on this edit.

If you notice on the right hand side, there’s a section that says “up next” this is a feature on YouTube where they show you similar videos to the one you’re watching on the right hand side. I decided to showcase the videos of other popular videos in this section. To do this I went to the videos and took a screenshot of a recognisable part of the video.

Right now there’s no animation taking place, so my next step is to animate parts of this. I then selected all of the layers, right clicked and selected “pre-compose”, doing this linked all of the layers together as if they were one.

All of the layers then joined as one and cleaned up the timeline area in the process.

The next thing to do was to add in a null object. The null object is essentially an invisible layer that I can pair with my pre-composition in order to create movement.

I attached my pre-composed layer to the null object and began adding my desired keyframes.

This particular animation only had one simple movement, so I only used the scale keyframe.

I added the easy ease effect to these keyframes to make the animation smoother.

This technique was done to only three animations. This was David After Dentist, Evolution of Dance and Charlie Bit My Finger. The other animations using this YouTube page effect, I took a little further.

Everything was the same up until the key-framing part. Instead, I made the pre-composed layer and the null object 3D. This allowed me to rotate the animation and give it an overall better and different look. Unless the layer is 3D, then you won’t be able to use the rotation options when key-framing.

I used these options for the other animations I created and played around with the keyframes on each one.

YouTubers Interviews Animation

In this section of the documentary there is an animation showing a map going from Swansea to London. I created this animation in Adobe After Effects.

To start this animation I went to Google Maps. I took a screenshot of Wales and England with Swansea and London in the view.

I then found a picture of a map pin on Google.

I began by creating a new project in After Effects and then creating a new composition.

I then imported the map screenshot and the map pin.

Once both were imported I scaled up the map and scaled down the map pin. Next I used the pin anchor tool, like I did for another animation to move the anchor point from the centre of the map pin to the bottom of it. This will make the map pin scale from the bottom rather than from the centre.

I then began key-framing the scale of the map pin. I put the map pin scale to zero at the beginning, moved over about a second and scaled it up to my desired size.

Again, like I did before, I wanted to create a bounce on the map pin. To do this, I went to google and copied the expression of a bounce from Graymachine.com.

I pasted the expression into the map pin layer and it gave me the bounce on the map pin.

Once I had done the animation to the map pin, I duplicated the layer so I could put the same map pin on the London part of the map.

I then used the pen tool to create a line going from one map pin to the other.

To then change the line from one solid line to a dashed line, I went into the layer and selected ‘contents’, ‘path 1’ and then ‘stroke 1’.

Within this stroke 1 panel, I was able to change the stroke from ‘butt cap’ to ’round cap’.

After that, I scrolled some more to the ‘dashes’ section and changed the gap between each dash in the line.

Doing this resulted in me getting the effect I needed.

The next step was to actually animate the dashes going from Swansea to London, what I did was select the ‘add’ option underneath the stroke layer and then selected ‘trim paths’.

Dropping down into the trim path section allowed me to begin the animation. I selected the ‘start’ stopwatch and started to key-frame where I wanted the stroke lines to begin and end.

I then moved the second map pin layer over so the map pin would pop up when the dashes reached it.

To get movement on the map I created a null object.

I then selected all of the layers and linked them to the null object.

Once the layers were paired with the null object, I began to key-frame the position of the map, creating the movement.

Now that the movement is on the map, the animation is complete and ready to be used in the documentary.

Main Edit

My two main edits are The History of YouTube section and The Influence on Kids section. I edited this section using Adobe Premiere Pro.

The History of YouTube

This section involves a few of the animations I created. I used these animations straight away in this section as they’re interesting to watch and immediately captures your attention. Towards the end of this section, we introduce the project and what you can expect to see throughout the documentary. I included clips from the YouTube Space in London and clips of the interviews as a teaser, this is something I thought worked well and made people want to continue watching.

The Influence on Kids

Within this section I have discussed three different YouTubers. The first two being Jake Paul and Logan Paul and the last being Morgz. I have used bright imagery throughout this section as bright colours are typically used by these types of YouTubers to attract a younger audience. Using Jake and Logan Paul was because they both are very popular amongst young children and have been involved in the most controversies on YouTube. I used Morgz for this same reason, however, he is a British YouTuber which makes him close to home for the people watching the documentary.

Thumbnail

The last stage of this edit for me is to create my individual thumbnail. I used Adobe Photoshop to create this thumbnail.

To begin with, I set my aspect ratio to 1280 x 720 as this is the typical thumbnail size.

I then began by importing the YouTube play button logo. This logo is a staple logo for YouTube and is even given out in diamond form to YouTubers who surpass 10 million subscribers.

Once imported I began to google YouTube thumbnails. I individually googled each YouTubers name to find my desired thumbnails. This process was long as I needed a lot of thumbnails for my image. I made sure there was only one thumbnail per YouTube as I wanted there to be diversity when you looked at each one.

After copying the thumbnails I started to paste each one onto the play button and then aligned them all.

I adjusted the size of the thumbnails by using the free transform tool.

I had to duplicate my play button and then erase the outside red of the duplicated layer so the white play logo could go over my thumbnails

As the play button is curved the thumbnails near the edge had to be erased as a curve so they would fit.

This was the finished product after I finished erasing the edges.

I decided I wanted to make the whole image have a red tint to mimic the original play button, so I made my background layer transparent and imported the edited play button into a new project.

I made the background transparent by double clicking the layer and turning the opacity down to zero.

When my image was imported, I adjusted the colour levels. I did this by going into ‘image’ on the top bar, then to adjustments and then I selected ‘color balance’

This selection brought up another bar which was where I adjusted the colours of my play button.

This is what the image then looked like.

To finish off, I added a background image.

To keep the focus on the play button I added a Gaussian blur to the background image.

After I added my background image, I made some small adjustments to enhance my play button, such as a drop shadow and an inner glow.

I was able to add more red to the thumbnail by using the ‘colorize’ selection in the hue/saturation tool bar.

I then created an original background for my thumbnail using a solid black layer and the text tool.

After looking at this thumbnail, I realised it wasn’t what I had envisioned. So, I created another new background.

I imported this new background into photoshop and turned the brightness down. I then imported images of YouTubers inside the sections.

I turned down the opacity on each of the YouTubers I imported so they would blend in to the background.

To make sure I knew what everything was I renamed each visible layer.

Below is my finished thumbnail.

After completing my finalised thumbnail I’m very happy with the results. The thumbnail making process was long due to my indecisiveness, but the changes were necessary as I now have a thumbnail I believe looks good. I decided to not add bright colours to the thumbnail as they’re usually added when the target audience is children. Bright and colourful thumbnails grabs the attention of children which makes them click on the video. My documentary is aimed at adults, so I think the dark simplistic colours is perfect for my demographic. Overall, my edited thumbnail turned out really well. The image is pleasing to the eye and lays directly on the leading lines. Creating this thumbnail allowed me to get even more comfortable with the different tools on Photoshop and helped me test my creativity.

Final Product

I have uploaded the final product of the documentary to my YouTube channel, complete with my custom thumbnail.

Final Major Project

Rationale

During the first seven units I have acquired a better understanding of the media industry. I have done primary and secondary research, analysed movies and advertisements. I have looked at the industry from the perspective of someone on the inside rather than a viewer. Before starting the course, I had little to no knowledge on how any of the Adobe software works, but after completing multiple assignments using Adobe, I am very comfortable in my abilities to use the software for all subjects. I have also used Logic Pro X to create my own original music and atmos sounds, this was difficult at first but in the end I got the hang of it. This course has made me more creative and allowed me to see ideas from different points of view rather than just my own. This has influenced my choice for my FMP as doing a documentary will test my skills on Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop, as well as testing my knowledge on shot types, framing and audio.

Project Concept

For this project I will be working with Dan and Cheye, we will be producing a documentary about YouTube. It will consist of the history of YouTube, what YouTube is today, how people earn a living and how it’s impacted generations. We will look into how YouTube has changed from a website where people uploaded home videos into a billion dollar business consisting of high quality content.

For our primary research, we will need to interview younger people who watch YouTube frequently, as well as that we will also be interviewing YouTubers who have successful channels. We also intend on going to London to the YouTube space which will give us an insider’s perspective.

Our documentary will include several sub-headings where we will discuss various topics about YouTube. I will be looking at the most successful past videos on YouTube and the difficulties in getting a popular video today.

In the documentary we want to offer a non-biased view on YouTube to see the positive and negative points about it. However, at the end we will give our final opinion on YouTube after doing this project. We have seven weeks to complete the FMP, so to ensure we complete the whole production process on time we will allocate each other specific roles to get everything running efficiently.

Resources needed:

• Camera(s)
• SD card(s)
• Computer
• Editing equipment
• Tripod
• YouTube
• Bus tickets for London

Evaluation

I will be documenting my research using my blog, this will allow me to keep on top of the paper work and prepare me for my production. When we interview people, we will be recording them, and taking photographs for our evidence. To ensure the project is completed we will be meeting up over the 2 week half term to record interviews. To minimise disruption in a group, we will assign each other individual tasks and communicate via social media.

Project Idea Generation

Before deciding on a YouTube documentary I went through a few other ideas.

We had the option of including one or more of the following project starters in our project.

• Re-tell, reboot, reimagine
• Fake news
• Screen life
• Discarded
• The role of the Observer – In today’s society and with the digital revolution we are constantly observing and being observed

I know I want to create something live action as that’s my preferred story telling method, so after looking at the project starters I decided to look into doing a reimagine first.

A few films we have looked into for a reimagine is –

• Harry Potter
• Bruce Almighty
• Back to the Future

Idea 1 – Harry Potter

The Harry Potter movies are some of the most iconic films of all time. The effects used in all of the movies are mesmerising. To reimagine a scene from Harry Potter I wanted to find out how to create a realistic wand effect as that’s a staple effect for the Harry Potter franchise. I looked on YouTube for some tutorials and ultimately decided on watching a video created by Cinecom.net who I watch frequently anyway.

The thing I liked most about this tutorial was that the whole effect is created in Premiere Pro. Usually effects like this require you to take the composition into After Effects.

The effect seems relatively simple as the lens flare is majority of the effect. During production, using an above head light is critical in ensuring this effect comes out well in post production.

Idea 2 – Bruce Almighty

Bruce Almighty is a film that we all loved the idea of reimagining a scene from. The God powers seemed like a good place to test our editing skills.

We began by looking at a scene from Bruce Almighty, a scene which everyone is likely to remember from the movie.

We thought about possibly recreating this scene but on a smaller scale. We know we can recreate the easier parts like when he changes clothes as his body isn’t in frame during that shot, but to do the walking on water scene and some of the others proved to be slightly more difficult. We came up with the idea of using a green screen and then adding in water in post production, but we don’t feel that it would be as realistic as we wanted it to be.

Instead of shunning away the idea, I decided to look for a tutorial on YouTube to create this scene. Luckily for me, Cinecom.net posted a tutorial on this exact scene from Bruce Almighty.

Cinecom also began with attempting to use a green screen, but once edited it didn’t look realistic and the lighting was completely off. They then decided to use boxes under the water and put a plastic cover over to walk on top of. They then filmed the empty lake at the same angle to take into Premiere Pro. To make the effect realistic they placed the clip of Jordy into the timeline and then added the clip of the empty lake on top. They then created an adjustment layer and used the mask feather tool to blend the water together to make the effect realistic.

After watching the effect in Premiere, it seems to be quite simple if you film the clips right. This effect is definitely a possibility and I will refer back to this tutorial if we do decide to use it.

Idea 3 – Back to the Future

When initially hearing that we could do a recreation, I instantly thought of doing Back to the Future as it’s my favourite movie. Reimagining a scene from Back to the Future will definitely be more challenging than one from Harry Potter and Bruce Almighty as the iconic scenes revolve around the DeLorean and time travel. I could however do something more basic, but I don’t think there would be any point in creating something Back to the Future related if it didn’t include the time travelling car.

The scene I want to try and recreate is this one below. I think this would be a great scene to recreate as the effect is fantastic and the foley I could produce for it would end up being really well.

I’m assuming to get a disappearing car effect i would need to use After Effects as it’s going to require a lot of animation.

Because I’m not entirely sure where to start, I looked up a tutorial on YouTube.

To get this effect they had their camera man on a skateboard following the car. This proved to be difficult because they had to get the framing correct while moving on a skateboard.

The effect in after effects is extremely complex and requires a lot of attention to detail and a lot of after effects knowledge. This effect would definitely be the most difficult to pull off, so I think I won’t be doing this one.

My Decided Project – YouTube Documentary

After looking into the reimagine title, my group and I have decided against doing it as we would prefer to do something original. When going through each of the project titles, we all seemed to be interested in ‘screen life’ and ‘discarded.’ We then discussed creating a documentary about YouTube as we all share an equal passion for it. Creating a documentary on YouTube will test my ability to use all of the skills I’ve learned throughout this year. I will be using Adobe Premiere Pro for the sequence, Adobe After Effects for animation work, and Adobe Photoshop for any thumbnails/posters I create.

Project Title

Now that my group and I have decided on creating a documentary about YouTube, we need to pick a title. Our title needs to be captivating as it’s the first thing people will hear and see when our documentary is completed.

We decided on the title: YouTube – Beyond the Screen. The reason we have titled it this is because we’re going to be looking into YouTube on a deeper level. Instead of just watching the content provided on the platform, we’re going to look into the statistics, talking with YouTubers, and researching into the background of the company, essentially going beyond what we see.

USP – Unique Selling Point

The unique selling point to our chosen project is that we are travelling to London to gather evidence and information from the company itself. Our documentary is going to include interviews with people who work there and people who use the platform as a source of income, which I believe no one else is going to be able to do.

Target Audience

Although our documentary will revolve heavily on YouTube and children, our target audience isn’t children. We want our documentary to be serious and informative, which is why our documentary will be aimed at adults. We wanted to target an older audience because they’re the ones who are going to be curious about what their children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews, brothers/sisters etc are watching. I’d say our target audience would be anywhere between the ages of 21 – 50. I’ve chosen this large of an age gap because that’s where adults with younger family members are in age. Having a more mature audience means we will need to be careful to not lose their interest when discussing YouTube. The topic of YouTube can wander over the line of being too puerile, depending on how we go about it. We will need to script our documentary strategically to appeal to the mature demographic.

My Finished Project Location

Once I have completed my documentary I will be posting it to my YouTube channel. The reason for this is not only because our documentary is based on YouTube, but because YouTube is a free to upload site. Furthermore, the majority of people use YouTube and will be able to access our documentary without any issues.

My channel link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWQbnpDAIuJc1MnuEZYWp5Q

Other Information

Knowing that YouTube is a large social media platform, we decided that we would advertise and post about our progress on the documentary on social media. The best location we found for this was Instagram. We set up an instagram page and posted a variety of different things regarding the documentary, including highlights with the script, behind the scenes and our personal progress under our names.

You can view our instagram page at: https://www.instagram.com/ytbeyondthescreen/

Mind Map

Now that we have decided on creating a documentary about YouTube, we can begin the production idea generation process.

In our documentary we want to begin by going through the history of YouTube. We want to discuss where it all started and what it is today. YouTube started as a place to upload home videos to share with friends and family, since then it’s grown into this huge phenomenon in which anyone can upload anything and possibly make a living by doing so.

To embed my ideas together, I created a mind map. Creating a mind map allowed me to categorise my initial ideas and develop them further.

As you can see, my mind map includes a lot of information on what I plan to do for this project. I wrote about my research ideas, which include primary and secondary research. For my primary research I will be creating surveys and conducting interviews. For my secondary research I will analyse viral videos, research books written by YouTubers and do general research on documentary styles.

In my mind map, I have included several different headings that relate to YouTube. These are going to be potential topics for the documentary. A lot of these topics do merge with each other. YouTube becoming mainstream is something that’s happening and companies using YouTube and posting everyday is proof of that as they can see there’s a market.

After creating a mind map with no limit, I created another mind map on one of the sections we are going to discuss in the documentary.

In this mind map I added YouTubers that have the most influence on their impressionable young audience at the top, and what YouTube as a whole could encourage children to think down the bottom. Since children are exposed to YouTube and YouTubers showing off their lavish lifestyle, this may give off the impression that they need to start YouTube to get that same lifestyle. This will result in children begging parents for expensive camera gear and the children having large expectations and believing that they will be a big YouTuber too which will likely lead to disappointment. Something that YouTubers seem to be doing a lot of these days is promoting their merchandise numerous times in each video. YouTube merchandise can be expensive, which is why instead of asking their parents because they’ll say no, children may use their parents credit/debit cards without permission. On the other hand, YouTube does show a lot of creativity, there’s videos that are incredible and this would make children become more creative when growing up. I can say that YouTube would help with a media career for a few reasons, the first being that I’ve seen it happen with a lot of my favourite YouTubers. I also got into media more because of YouTube and what my favourite YouTubers would say about the creative industry.

Mood Board

I created a mood board in order to visualise what I plan to do for this project.

Documentary Timeline

I wanted to create a timeline of what we plan on including in the documentary. Doing this was necessary in order to arrange the order of the main topics.

This timeline includes all of the different stages in our documentary from start to finish. I’ve assigned us all individual sections in the middle to distinguish our work apart from each other. Each of us have a topic that we will focus on for the documentary. I will be responsible for creating the title sequence, the history of YouTube section and any additional animation throughout the documentary as well as my individual section.

Project Action Plan and Timetable

Pitching and Feedback

I presented my FMP idea to five other people to see if I’m on the right track with my project concept. The feedback I received was mainly positive. However, I did receive some constructive criticism. This criticism was necessary to ensure that I produce work to the best of my ability and it was helpful to see some outside points of view. I also reviewed some of my peers blogs and gave them feedback.

What Went Well

I was told that my general idea had potential and it garnered some interest amongst my peers and my tutor, which is a great sign. My peers knew exactly what I was creating when I had explained it. They also liked my idea to research into the different documentary modes.

What I Can Improve on

I was told to rearrange some posts on my blog for it to flow better and told to add more detail in certain areas to reach the criteria given. Another part of my blog I was told to expand on was my project concept. My original concept was too complicated to understand what exactly I wanted to produce, so I decided to change it to give anyone reading a better understanding. I was also told to have a group meeting with my team members about the editing style, this is due to each individual having a their own personal style and when we join our individual sections together, the edit will likely be jumpy and lack any flow. To avoid a puzzling edit, we will be discussing what editing style we will all follow.

Bibliography

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Primary Research

Younger Audience Questionnaire

For our primary research we need to get responses from children. This will prove difficult as our we have previously created questionnaires and shared them to our social medias to get a response. The age group we are targeting this questionnaire at will not be on any of our social medias.

We have contacted a school in hopes to hand out a questionnaire.

This is the link to our first questionnaire.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/TWX66X6

Our questions include:

1. What is your dream job? (multiple choice)
2. Who is your favourite YouTuber? (text box)
3. How easy do you think it is to be a YouTuber? (multiple choice)
4. What are your favourite type of YouTube videos? (multiple choice)
5. Do you make YouTube videos? (multiple choice)
6. If not, do you want to make YouTube videos in the future? (multiple choice)

Results

Question 1

To begin our questionnaire we wanted to immediately know whether children in this day believe that being a YouTuber is their dream job. This is why we began by asking this question.

As you can see below, 75% of children said that their dream job is becoming a YouTuber. This suggests that as YouTube is becoming more mainstream, this generation of children are aspiring for that to be their career rather than the typical 9-5 job.

Question 2

Since we’re trying to identify the YouTubers younger people watch, we decided to ask them who they tend to watch. We left this question as open as possible as we didn’t want to limit the people answering to a select few. This makes this question more objective as we’re not just assuming who people watch.

As you can see, the most frequently chosen answer was either Logan Paul or Jake Paul. This now gives us a better insight as to who children are watching the most. Knowing who children are watching gives me an advantage for my section “The Influence on Kids” as I now know who I need to be researching for the documentary.

Question 3

In this question we wanted to know if children understand the amount of work that goes into sustaining a successful YouTube channel. Looking at these results, majority of the children chose the “really easy” option or the “easy option”. 50% of people answered that it is really easy and 33% answered that it is easy. Although this shows that children aren’t aware of the work that goes into creating videos, it also shows that they see YouTube as a regular obtainable career.

Question 4

In order to understand the genre people tend to watch more, we came up with a list of the most popular YouTube genres. No surprise to me, 43% of children answered vlogging. This is the type of genre that Logan Paul and Jake Paul fall under as well.

Question 5

Since at the beginning we used YouTube being a dream career as a possibility, we wanted to ask the children if they have already started making YouTube videos. The difference between YouTube and other jobs is that you can start at a very young age and with the right amount of traffic to your channel you can still generate an income regardless of how young you are. However, only 25% of people said that they currently make YouTube videos.

Question 6

The last question relates to the previous question in a way. We didn’t think that all of the children answering this questionnaire would all make YouTube videos now even if they wanted to. Creating videos means you need a camera and something to edit on, which children likely don’t have access to at the moment. So, we asked them if they want to make videos in the future, 83% of these said yes.

Older Audience Questionnaire

As well as needing informations on what children are watching on YouTube, we needed to get the same type of information from an older demographic. We created another Survey Monkey questionnaire and shared it on our social medias and to our friends and families.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/P6YSWBK

Question 1

From the beginning we wanted to know how old the person answering the survey is, this will tell us what demographic we’re mostly hearing from. 60% of the survey takers were aged 18-24. We were hoping to get a wide range of people from older age groups answering, but with us falling into the 18-24 category ourselves, it was harder to contact people in older age groups. However, the 18-24 age category is still adults and that’s what we were going for anyway.

Question 2

We then wanted to know how often people are watching YouTube videos, this gives us a clear indication if the survey takers are up to date on YouTube trends and the current popular YouTubers. Unsurprisingly, 75% of people said they watch YouTube daily, and the other highest percentage was 21% of people saying they watch every few days and only 3% of saying monthly. This shows that YouTube as an entertainment platform, seems to be relied on often, much like TV used to be.

Question 3

The results to this question are all in a similar range. The highest result is gaming with 27%, and then vlogs and comedy both coming second with 21%. Knowing that people are watching vlogs, gaming videos and comedic videos also tells us that people are watching the current popular style of videos rather than the not so popular genres. Again, showing us that they will be aware of YouTube trends and popular YouTubers. Unlike the other question results, almost every one of the options was selected, this shows us that YouTube has a wide range of content to suit anyones personal preferences.

Question 4

We left this question open as we didn’t want to limit the survey takers to just a select few that we chose ourselves. The creators that were answered the most was Shane Dawson, Pewdiepie and TGFBRO. All of these people are extremely popular and the survey takers chose these options because their content is “interesting” “amazing and hilarious” and because they put effort into the videos they’re producing.

Question 5

In the last question, to compare with the younger generation survey, we wanted to ask who their least favourite YouTubers are. The YouTubers that come up the most in this question is Jake Paul and Logan Paul, both of which cater their content towards children.

Whats interesting about both of these questionnaires, is that the majority of votes for favourite YouTuber in the children’s questionnaire was Jake Paul and Logan Paul. However, in the adults questionnaire Jake Paul and Logan Paul received the most votes for least favourite YouTubers. These results were interesting and have made our group decide to research into Jake and Logan and try to understand why they’re loved by the younger generation, yet hated by the older generation.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/P6YSWBK

Secondary Research

Screen Life

My FMP project concept revolves around screen life. As I’m creating a documentary about YouTube, I will need to look into how often people are using technology to watch it. In doing this research, I want to see how reliant humanity is on technology.

I googled ‘screen time’ to see what the first few results would be.

I came across an article about how there’s a feature on the Apple iPhone that allows you to limit your screen time and tells you how long you’ve been on each of your apps.

I read into this article to find out information about the feature and how it works. According to The Verge (2018) you can set yourself a timer that gives you an allocated amount of time to use your apps, such as Instagram and YouTube. Once the timer has ran out, IOS will block your access to these apps.

I think that this feature alone proves that there’s a massive problem when it comes to our usage with the latest technology, and although having the feature is a step in the right direction to dilute our usage, having the ‘remind me in 15 minutes’ option seems slightly redundant.

As my YouTube documentary includes children’s usage of the website, I decided to look into children and screen time. I browsed through articles so I could find a little bit of detailed information. According to ‘Today’s Parents’ (2018), the average age a child receives a mobile phone is at 10 years old. ‘Today’s Parents’ then go on to say that children are exposed to mobile phones and technology long before that age, and that it’s common to see toddlers using mobile phones and iPads. They then urge parents who are allowing their younger children to have a mobile phone that they should be monitoring YouTube because the children can end up being exposed to inappropriate content.

This article was definitely helpful for me as it mentions children aimlessly using YouTube, and this is one of the issues we want to discuss in our documentary.

YouTube Age Statistics

After looking up screen time, I want to see what age groups are using YouTube the most, doing this will help with the documentary. I googled information about YouTube stats and came across a website that pushes out analytic articles about all social medias.

Reading the article not only gave me insight on what age groups are using YouTube but gave me some great financial information that is needed.

Omnicore (2019) claims that “35+ and 55+ are the fastest growing YouTube demographics.” They also state that “75% of adults turn to YouTube for nostalgia rather than tutorials or current events.” Another interesting thing they claimed was that “37% of the coveted 18 – 34 demographic are binge-watching.”

Documentary Research

As my chosen idea is a documentary, to further my knowledge I’ve decided to look into different documentary styles to gather inspiration for my own.

I’ve looked into the 6 modes of documentaries.

• Observational Documentary
• Expository Documentary
• Participatory Documentary
• Reflexive Documentary
• Performative Documentary
• Poetic Documentary

Observational Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), an observational documentary is one that is real. During the 60’s and 70’s camera lenses became faster which allowed for better shooting in low light, cameras also became smaller.

This change in technology meant that the subject being filmed forgot that they were being filmed because of the cameras new compact size. This is why this type of documentary is sometimes referred to as ‘fly-on-the-wall’

Example

An example of an Observational Documentary is the 2009 documentary film ‘Knuckles’ directed by Ian Palm.

Expository Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), an expository documentary is a type of documentary that we’re modernly familiar with. This type of documentary includes a lot of research, scripting, interviews, scripted narration, illustrative visuals and more.

Example

An example of an Expository Documentary is the 2015 documentary ‘Back in Time’ which was directed by Jason Aron.

Participatory Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), a participatory documentary is one in which the filmmaker and the subject interact on camera regarding the situation they are documenting. The filmmaker will engage with the situation.

Example

An example of a Participatory Documentary is the documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine’ which was directed by Michael Moore.

Reflexive Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), a reflexive documentary is a type of documentary that makes the viewer question whether the documentary is legitimate or not. Usually the filmmaker will show how the documentary is constructed. The audience are shown the sound, the editing and the recording.

Example

An example of a Reflexive Documentary is the 1929 documentary “Man with a Movie Camera” which was directed by Dziga Vertov.

Performative Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), a performative documentary is one that the filmmaker has involvement with the particular subject. It is the opposite of an observational documentary.

Example

An example of a Performative Documentary is the 2010 documentary ‘Catfish’ which was directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost.

Poetic Documentary –

According to ‘Video Maker’ (2015), a poetic documentary is one where they want to ‘create a mood or impression rather than argue a point’

Example

An example of a poetic documentary is the 2008 short documentary ‘The House is Black’ which was directed by Forugh Farrokhzad.

My Documentary Mode

After researching all of the different documentary modes, I think my YouTube documentary will an expository documentary, and participatory may come into it at a certain point.

Back in Time – Documentary

Since my documentary will fall into the expository mode, I want to take a closer look at the Back in Time documentary that I used as an example. I will be using this documentary as a source of inspiration for my own.

This documentary came out in 2015 as a 30th anniversary special for Back to the Future. According to Back in Time, it gives us “a look at the very real impact the Back to the Future movies have had on our culture”. This documentary essentially goes into detail about the creation of the Back to the Future movies from 1985, 1989 and 1990. This documentary was released on October 21st 2015, which is the day in the second Back to the Future movie that Marty Mcfly travels to.

The main component I wanted to look at in this documentary was the interview styles. Within this documentary we see interviews with various different people, including the cast and crew. Taking a closer look at these interviews, I’ve noticed they’ve directed the interviewees to not look into the camera when answering a question.

Another thing I’ve noticed in these interviews is that most people are in a relaxed environment. Perhaps this less formal of an environment gives the viewer a more home like feeling and makes them more inclined to pay attention as they can relate to the surroundings.

At the beginning of the documentary the voice over is placed over a series of relating images which I presume would work well in our documentary. When the images are on the screen, there is either a pan in, pan across or pan out effect used, this gives the images more of a live action feel and allows you to leave the picture on the screen for your desired amount of time without losing the attention of your audience. To allow even more time for the images to run for the right amount of time as the voice over, there is a dissolve transition used, this is something that I can take into consideration when editing my documentary.

As well as this, when the interviewee is speaking, we usually see a scene from the movie. Doing this makes the interviews in the documentary more engaging and it keeps the attention of the viewer. If there were no movie clips or images placed over the interviews, it could become too boring watching the same scene without any changes.

When the screen switches back to the interview once it’s shown a clip from the movie or an image, the camera is usually at a different angle. These small details that you wouldn’t normally notice is why the documentary flows so well and keeps you interested.

Looking at this documentary has given me a better insight on the techniques I need to use when interviewing people. It’s given me an understanding on how to engage my audience and how to keep the flow and pace of my documentary. The one thing this documentary does in regards to interviews that I likely won’t be doing is cutting out the questions. In this documentary we never hear the interviewer ask a question, I believe this is because the interviewees have a significant amount to say about their experiences with the movies that there’s no need to include the questions or any dialogue from the interviewer. In my documentary we will not have as much time so we will be asking a short amount of questions which will be heard or seen on screen.

YouTube Documentary Research

Since I’m creating a documentary about YouTube, I think it’s only fitting that I look into documentaries created by YouTubers. Luckily for me, right now Shane Dawson is using his YouTube channel to produce his own documentary series’ with many different media elements.

https://www.youtube.com/user/shane/videos

Shane Dawsons documentaries are usually a series. They tend to revolve around another YouTuber and show us (the viewers) an inside look at these YouTubers life. The last documentary Shane did was on Jake Paul, the documentary was 8 parts long and the last part to the series was 1 hour and 45 minutes long, which is a surreal amount of time for a YouTube video.

The documentary titled ‘The Mind of Jake Paul’ begins by exploring the possibility of Jake Paul being a sociopath, Shane meets with a therapist and discusses Jakes personality along with the controversial things he’s done and been involved with on camera over the last few years. Shane eventually meets with Jake Paul himself and brings this therapist along, without Jake knowing she was evaluating him. Shane also meets with Jakes ex-girlfriend, the ex COO of his company, and his current girlfriend. He interviews all of these people, including Jake.

I’d say that Shane doesn’t have just one documentary mode, within his series the documentary modes definitely overlap. The modes I believe are included are expository, participatory and performative.

I enjoyed this documentary series for a number of different reasons. I liked the editing throughout, at the beginning there was an animation of the documentary name that became the staple point of the series. The sound effects used worked really well and were placed in at the right moments. The montage used when going through Jakes social media life was fantastically put together and is something I’d like to do similar when creating mine. Watching Shane’s documentaries has given me a more modern approach to documentary creating and the feedback he’s received from the style has been positive.

Researching this particular documentary that Shane produced will help me when doing the rest of my research and when filming my documentary. Jake Paul will be heavily discussed during the documentary, so to learn more about him by watching this 8 part series is only a benefit to me.

Secondary Research – Viral Videos

On YouTube, and on any social media these days, viral videos occur very often and are forgotten about very quickly. Due to the time period and the advancement of technology, there are so many viral videos happening daily that it would be impossible to count them all. However, when YouTube first started in 2005, technology was no where near as advanced, in fact, none of the popular social medias where videos go viral even existed at the time. The fact that there was very little social media, and not as many people were using YouTube back then meant that viral videos were rare, but when they happened, they stuck for a long time.

I want to create a YouTube history timeline, but to do so, I will need to go down the chain and look at some past viral videos.

Viral Video 1 – Charlie bit my finger – again ! (2007)

Charlie bit my finger is perhaps one of the most iconic and recognisable viral videos to date. In fact, this video is so popular that 12 years later it’s still receiving many views and the boys have recently been interviewed on TV.

I looked up an interview and found one with the whole family on This Morning (2017), Howard, who is the boys dad claimed that he uploaded this video to YouTube as a private video solely because you couldn’t send videos over email back then and he wanted to send it to the boys godfather in America, he then made it public for the rest of his family to see. He wanted to take the video down a few months later and saw that it had around 10,000 to 20,000 views and then gained millions of views. The mother then goes on to say that the video has allowed her to pay for all four of her children to go to private school.

Today, I don’t think that a video like this would go viral. There’s far too many people using YouTube and other social media platforms that this would get lost in the shuffle. But back then, this wasn’t something we had seen and it was hilarious. TV shows such as ‘RudeTube’ helped these types of videos go even more viral and linger for longer because they were being played on main stream TV where it opened it up to an even larger audience. The video and the interview also shows us the power of YouTube, just uploading a home video without any plan of it going viral has made this family a lot of money, and has likely opened up plenty of opportunities for the boys now that they’re older.

Viral Video 2 – David After Dentist (2009)

David after the dentist is another viral video from 10 years ago which is still talked about today. I chose to look into this particular viral video because it’s one that I can remember really well. When asking people about viral videos, this was one most people remembered too.

This video was so popular that celebrities were even copying it. In 2010 Justin Bieber did a recreation of this video for ‘Funny Or Die’. Funny Or Die create comedy videos with celebrities.

Upon reading the description of the original video, I’ve learned that this video was filmed by Davids dad so he could show Davids mother later on that day. After it was uploaded to YouTube the video blew up.

Since the video is over 10 years old, I want to see if there are any recent videos with David now that he’s older.

I found an interview with David and his dad on HLN (2013). In this interview Davids dad claims that the revenue from the video allowed him and his family to do things they would have never been able to do before, like travelling to different states and countries. Just like the parents of Charlie from ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’, Davids dad says that the money he’s earned from the video has been enough to put David and his brother into private school.

Davids dad did not divulge how much money they earned, so I wanted to research it myself. According to the ‘Business Insider’ (2010) the video made $150,000. Business Insider also says that the video received 3 million views in the first few days.

This type of viral video again shows the power of YouTube and how one upload can literally change people’s lives. This video is still a classic YouTube video and is still shared on various social media platforms. Today, lot of people film themselves after going to the dentist and having teeth removed just because of this video.

YouTuber Books

When someone becomes successful on YouTube, there’s no doubt that they’re going to capitalise on that success and release a book. Most YouTubers release autobiographies.

Looking into a YouTubers autobiography will be a massive help to me in my process of learning what it takes to be a YouTuber and how it changes peoples lives.

The book I’m going to be looking into is ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ by Kian Lawley and Jc Caylen.

This book contains multiple chapters about their lives growing up and their lives on YouTube, so this is perfect.

Both Kian and Jc created their individual channels in 2010. They were part of a collaboration channel called ‘Our2ndLife’ which began in 2012, but Kian didn’t join until later on. They created a duo channel titled ‘KianAndJc’ in 2014 and that’s where they upload today.

To find out background information on how YouTube was for them when they first began I read their individual chapters in their book.

Lawley (2016) states that “Back then YouTube was like one big family. No one knew what they were doing, and everyone helped everyone else out.” (p. 35)

The interesting thing about the famous YouTubers now is that most of them started doing silly videos without any expensive equipment needed, and people weren’t as serious and selfish about views and quality.

Caylen (2016) states “In the beginning my videos were pretty simple. Sometimes it was just me going to a park and recording the ducks getting fed, or close-ups of me feeding oats to horses out of my hand, or the light on the grass at sunrise… Then I’d take all the footage and set it to a song I really liked, and that would be my video.” (p.67)

Reading this book has opened my eyes to the history of YouTube and to what it is today. The difference is astonishing, if someone was to upload videos of them feeding ducks and editing a song over the clip it would not receive any views.

Creators and Their Contribution to YouTube

To include in the documentary, each of us in the group have decided to research two successful YouTubers. In this research, I will provide a brief description on the YouTuber, I will then discuss their success and how they’ve maintained their audience. I will also look into any controversies surrounding the YouTuber and see what affect it has on their channel using the website ‘Social Blade’ which gives information on every YouTube channels statistics, past and present.

To begin with, we will be researching the same YouTuber that we will later be interviewing, ‘BirdKeeperToby.’ Researching Toby will give us a better understanding of him and his channel before we move on to the interview during production.

I will then be looking into one of the most popular YouTubers of all time, Jake Paul. I have chosen to research Jake Paul not only for his popularity, but for all of the controversies and success he’s had on YouTube over the years.

Bird Keeper Toby

Bird Keeper Toby is a 24 year old British YouTuber who created his channel on December 14th 2014. Toby makes videos relating to the Pokemon franchise. Over the course of almost five years Toby has amassed a subscriber count of over 200,000, with his total views being more than 31 million. As well as this, Toby has a vlog channel where he would upload a variety of different videos about his life. Toby created this channel on August 17th 2016. On this channel he has accumulated eight thousand subscribers, and more than 150,000 total views.

As previously mentioned, Toby has a large subscriber count, but this didn’t come easy. Toby has uploaded 367 videos to his main channel overall, and to this day keeps up a regular schedule where he posts roughly 2 videos around 8-15 minutes long per week. Toby receives a good amount of views when he uploads, averaging between 10,000 and 20,000. Toby’s most viewed video was uploaded on the 27th September 2018 and is sitting at more than 800,000 views. Before this, his most popular video was uploaded more than 2 years ago and received over 600,000 views. Toby’s audience consists of Pokemon fans who can get educated on the franchise and hear his personal opinions on it.

Toby has kept his YouTube channel very professional and hasn’t been in any controversies. Upon looking at his videos, he keeps his channel family friendly. Toby refrains from inappropriate language and actions in his videos. Although I can’t specifically pin point the age group of his audience, his family friendly nature, cartoon profile picture, bright/colourful and cartoon thumbnails suggests his videos are targeted at children.

Keeping up this family friendly image opens up many opportunities for Toby. An opportunity that arose for Toby was ‘Summer in the City.’ According to the Summer in the City website (2019) Summer in the City is “the UK’s largest and longest-running online video festival”. They also state on the website that the event includes a meet and greet, live performances, panels and awards.

On the 1st August 2017, Toby uploaded a video to his vlog channel titled “Come To Summer In The City!” in which he stated that he will be a guest at Summer in the City. Toby says that he will be doing two different panels, a gaming tournament and a meet and greet.

An opportunity like this is great for content creators as it provides them with channel exposure, as well as giving them similar opportunities in the future. As Summer in the City is the largest UK YouTube event, there’s no doubt that Toby being a guest has made an impact on his channel.

Looking at Toby’s channel statistics on ‘Social Blade’ for the month of August (the month of Summer in the City) Toby’s total views for the month were 846 thousand, which is impressive and up from the previous month.

Looking at the months to follow, Toby kept up his videos views, further proving that receiving the Summer in the City opportunity gave him more exposure. For the next three months Toby received more than a million views per month.

Another example of receiving opportunities being essential for growth and success on YouTube is Toby’s most viewed video that I previously mentioned. This video was a brand deal that he received to promote a new Pokemon game. In this video Toby claims that he and a few friends were asked to attend the official Pokemon company in London. In this video he plays two games (Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee) before the release. The popularity of this video allowed Toby to gain the most amount of subscribers in a month that he had in all of 2018.

Looking at these opportunities and brand deals that Toby has received over the years has shown me that him keeping up a good family friendly image has been essential to his growth on YouTube.

Jake Paul

Jake Paul is a 22 year old American YouTuber who gained popularity uploading videos to the now discontinued app ‘Vine.’ In an interview with Bazaar (2017) Jake reveals how he started gaining followers. He claims that he and his brother downloaded the app Vine and began uploading six second videos. They both became competitive and tried to see who could gain the most followers, after uploading a video together that went viral on the app, he gained more than 5,000 followers and they then capitalised on their small success and began uploading frequently gaining hundreds of thousands followers. Jake now has a popular YouTube channel that he created on September 19th 2013. Since his channel creation Jake has received almost 6 billion total video views and has accumulated more than 18 million subscribers, making him one of the most popular YouTubers today. Jakes YouTube videos fall under the vlogger category as he creates videos about his everyday life. Jake also creates music, which are usually diss tracks.

After his success on Vine and YouTube Jake became the first YouTuber to obtain a main role on a Disney Channel show. Jake was cast as ‘Dirk Mann’ on ‘Bizaardvark.’ Bizaardvark is a show about internet stars who post to a fictional network called ‘Vuuugler’. (Disney Channel, 2019).

According to IMDb, Jake appeared in the first episode of Bizaardvark titled ‘first!’. They also state that the first episode aired on June 24th 2016. (2019). Jakes character on Bizaardvark is very similar to himself on YouTube. Dirk Mann runs a channel on Vuuugler titled ‘DareMeBro!’ where he receives dares from his fans and posts videos of him doing the dares on his channel. This is something that Jake does in his vlogs on YouTube.

At the time of this episode airing, Jake was uploading daily vlogs to his YouTube channel. The months following the beginning of Bizaardvark, Jake was receiving an astonishing amount of subscribers per month.

Looking at social blade, the month after the first episode of Bizaardvark aired, Jake received 26.15k subscribers.

The following months, these subscriber numbers only went up.

Jakes subscribers went up from roughly 26,000 a month to nearly 2 million subscribers a month, all in just one year of him being on a mainstream Disney Channel show.

However, Jakes success on Disney Channel was short lived, as on July 23rd 2017, Jake announced on his twitter account that he and Disney Channel had parted ways.

Jake claims that the reason he’s leaving Disney Channel is because he wants to focus on his YouTube channel and other business ventures. Although, the circumstances surrounding Jake at the time of his parting suggests otherwise.

On July 17th 2017, (five days before his Disney Channel exit announcement) Channel 5 did a news segment on Jake Paul and his disruption to his neighbourhood. At this time Jake was living in West Hollywood renting a house with fellow YouTubers signed to his company ‘Team 10’. As previously mentioned, Jake had been making daily videos, during this time the videos consisted of him doing things like setting his pool on fire, destroying property, revving his motorcycle in the street and that’s just the tip of the iceberg that was Jakes vlogs at the time.

As you can image, this caused a lot of distress and frustration to his neighbours. During the channel 5 interview, the reporter states to Jake that the neighbours are complaining about his antics, Jake asks “why” and the reporter says it’s because they believe Jakes made the neighbourhood like a “living hell” and a “circus.” Jake responds with “I mean, but people like going to circuses” with all of his Team 10 members around him encouraging this narrative (2017). During this interview Jake jumps on top of the news van and jokes about the interviewers shoes.

This lack of maturity and professionalism is what people believe that Jake was fired from Disney Channel. Since Disney Channel is a mainstream business, having Jake be apart of their main cast for a children’s show or being affiliated with him at all after this carnage would only look bad on them. In a self diss track uploaded on August 27th 2017, Jake sings these lyrics “It’s everyday bro, where’s the Disney Channel flow? lost your contract, no more Micky Mouse dough”. These lyrics written by Jake himself tell us that he and Disney Channel didn’t mutually part ways like he previously led on, they do however tell us that he lost his contract, which translates to he was fired.

Looking at Jakes Social Blade after he was fired from Disney Channel and received national television press, his monthly views were the highest they had ever been, with him accumulating more than 460 million views for that same month.

However, once the publicity had subsided, his monthly views began to fluctuate.

With all of this controversy surrounding Jake Paul, it’s difficult to remember that Jakes main demographic is children. When looking at Jakes channel, it’s blatantly obvious that his videos are targeted at children due to the bright colours in his banner and thumbnails. Evidence that suggests Jakes videos are created for children is his song titled “THE JAKE PAULERS SONG” Jake Paulers are what he refers to his fanbase as. In the music video for this song, Jake sings that the Jake Paulers are the “number one fanbase”. In the music video Jake is surrounded by tweens, who are the “Jake Paulers” proving that this is his targeted demographic.

After all of the controversies surrounding Jake, his fanbase still stick by him. Today, he still receives millions of views per video. Every month in 2019 so far, Jake has exceeded more than 100 million views.

Below you can see that Jakes channel is still thriving on a daily basis.

This proves that Jakes younger fanbase have either forgotten about his controversies or they simply don’t care and will watch his content regardless of his actions.

In conclusion, looking at these two very different YouTubers has allowed me to view things from a YouTubers perspective rather than just a viewer. I’ve seen how public main stream controversies can impact a channel and how keeping up a family friendly image can provide you with various opportunities. Although both Toby and Jakes demographic is children, their content is in no way the same, the only thing similar about these two creators is the bright colours on their channels.

Libel and Slander

In the documentary we will be discussing the controversies surrounding a handful of YouTubers, to ensure we aren’t breaking any defamation laws, I’ve decided to look into libel and slander.

Libel

According to dictionary.com (2019), libel is “defamation by written or printed words, pictures, or any form other than by spoken words or gestures”.

Slander

According to dictionary.com (2019), slander is “defamation by oral utterance rather than by writing, pictures, etc.”

Looking at these two definitions, I believe that both libel and slander could apply to us when creating this documentary. Libel is possible when we show any pictures or videos in the documentary. Slander may be possible in our script as we will be using it to record a voice over.

Since we want our documentary to be as objective as possible, we still need to see what we need to put in place to avoid breaking any of these laws. Looking at an article on BookWork, they claim that if what you’re saying is true, and it’s backed up with facts and not your opinion, then you are breaking no defamatory laws even if what you’re saying is embarrassing or offensive (2017). Knowing this has made me aware that I need to fact check any information I use on these YouTubers. I will also not be giving my personal opinion on any YouTubers in the documentary.

End Screen Edit

We all decided as a group that we don’t want our end screen to just be rolling titles, we believe everyone will be using this technique. To make our end screen stand out from the rest, we want to either include bloopers or unseen footage next to the credits.

Looking at the end credits for the movie ‘Anchorman’ it is exactly what we want to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kKB6LUyDf8

We decided we don’t want any rolling text, instead we want our text to be still as our cast and crew isn’t going to be that big so the rolling credits will be unnecessary.

Research in Practice

Title Sequence

As I’m working with two other people, I have been assigned to create the title sequence for our documentary. I have an idea of what I want to do for the title sequence, but I will need to look at some YouTube tutorials as this is a more advanced After Effects technique than I’m used to.

My idea for this title sequence came from the teaser trailer for 13 Reasons Why Season 2.

For my title sequence edit, I’ve looked at a YouTube video from a YouTuber called Andrew James. Andrew creates tutorial videos on different techniques in most of the Adobe Applications.

In this tutorial Andrew has explained and demonstrated how another YouTuber created this effect in his video.

Following this technique, I began by editing polaroid images in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, I imported a polaroid image from online and used an old image of myself, Dan and Cheye.

After creating all three of my test images, I moved on to the footage.

I began by importing my chosen footage into Premiere Pro. I dragged it into the timeline, right clicked on it and selected “replace with after effects composition.”

Once the footage was in After Effects, I right clicked on the footage and selected “Track & Stabilize” and clicked on “Track Camera”

After the footage was tracked, I was able to select my points and add my polaroid images to my chosen areas in the footage. I had to make sure my polaroid images were 3D so I could adjust and rotate them to make it more realistic looking.

As you can see, I placed the images quite close together as the camera movement naturally panned across them.

I have uploaded my practice edit to my YouTube channel.

Reflecting on this practice edit, I now know that the polaroid effect is something I will be using in the official title sequence. Although I do hope the official title sequence will be a lot smoother.

Glitch Text

I want to create a text that glitches for the different sections of the documentary. I will look up some YouTube tutorials in order to do this.

The tutorial I will be looking into is by ‘Learnin5’ This tutorial offers a simple technique of creating the glitch effect. This will be my first time attempting an effect like this.

In this tutorial, the creator supplies a link to a free stock video that has the glitch effect. I downloaded this video and began following the tutorial.

The tutorial says to create a new composition in After Effects and to import the downloaded glitch video.

I added in a background created by Daniel Parfitt and began following the next steps. The next steps involved adding an adjustment layer with the displacement map effect applied and making the displacement map react to the screen glitch video. This then made the text glitch.

After following the rest of the tutorial, this is what my text looked like.

I then exported this edit using the Adobe Media Encoder and uploaded it to my YouTube channel.

For my first attempt, I think this isn’t that bad. However, since the adjustment layer is reacting to the glitching video, with a background that’s not a solid colour it looks as though it’s glitching in a square and not on the text alone. When I create this effect again, I will be sure to include a solid background as it will make the text stand out more and it will give the impression that only the text is glitching.

Particles Logo

As previously stated, I am responsible for creating the title sequence which has given me the idea to create a text logo before we see the polaroid animation. I like the idea of using the glitch text like, but I want to experiment with other ideas before I make my final decision.

The tutorial YouTuber I used for the polaroid effect uses a memorable text logo at the beginning of his videos, and lucky for me he has a video about it.

Rather than creating a tutorial on the effect, he offers a free download of the effect. Since I liked the effect, I downloaded this free pack.

After downloading the effect, I opened it up in After Effects.

It then gave me this

From this, you can change the text to whatever you want it to say. To change the text I went from the ‘Sand Text Effect’ and into ‘Particles Comp’.

I was then able to change my text and add that same background that Dan had created.

To make the edit more of my own I added lens dirt. I turned the mode to screen and made the layer 3D, I then key-framed the position for the lens dirt to move.

I then exported the effect and uploaded it to YouTube.

Overall, I think this edit looks good but I don’t think it’s something I will be using in the documentary. The reason for this is because I didn’t create the entire edit myself, I only changed the text name.

San Mateo Map Animation

In the History of YouTube section I want there to be an animation that mimics a drone. I searched up some animation tutorials on YouTube and I found one that is perfect for my idea.

After watching this tutorial, I attempted to create this effect with another group member, Dan.

Pitching and Feedback

I presented my FMP idea to five other people to see if I’m on the right track with my project concept. The feedback I received was mainly positive. However, I did receive some constructive criticism. This criticism was necessary to ensure that I produce work to the best of my ability and it was helpful to see some outside points of view. I also reviewed some of my peers blogs and gave them feedback too.

What Went Well

I was told that my general idea had potential and it garnered some interest amongst my peers and my tutor, which is a great sign. My peers knew exactly what I was creating when I had explained it. They also liked my idea to research into the different documentary modes.

What I Can Improve on

I was told to rearrange some posts on my blog for it to flow better and told to add more detail in certain areas to reach the criteria given. Another part of my blog I was told to expand on was my project concept. My original concept was too complicated to understand what exactly I wanted to produce, so I decided to change it to give anyone reading a better understanding. I was also told to have a group meeting with my team members about the editing style, this is due to each individual having a their own personal style and when we join our individual sections together, the edit will likely be jumpy and lack any flow. To avoid a puzzling edit, we will be discussing what editing style we will all follow.

Primary Research

We wanted to split our Primary Research into two different sections. The first being information we gathered from children and the second being information we gathered from adults.

Our first idea was to create a questionnaire to hand out in a primary school or to children aged 12 and below in a comprehensive school. We decided we would write up an email to send to Dwr-y-Felin comprehensive as it’s located opposite the college.

Below you can see the email we constructed to send to the school.

Once the email was complete, we began writing up a questionnaire to hand out to the children on the day. Below I have attached a PDF of this questionnaire that we sent in.

We then decided that creating visuals for the children would be more engaging. We began to create a powerpoint which included visuals of the questions on the questionnaire.

I have linked below a PDF of this presentation.

All seemed to be going according to plan until we were told by the school that it was too short notice to go in and hand out questionnaires. This definitely gave us a negative start to the project. Instead of looking at the questionnaire as a waste of time, we decided to write it up using the website ‘Survey Monkey’. We then shared the questionnaire on to Facebook and I sent the link to my younger siblings. We didn’t receive as many results as we wanted with this survey due to not being able to contact a large group of children. Next time, I will take into consideration how much time a school needs in order to arrange a day where we can go in and hand out questionnaires. The results we received from the online questionnaire were essential and became a big part of ur project.

We then decided to create another questionnaire on Survey Monkey, only this time the questions were catered towards older people. We came up with the questions and shared the survey on our Facebook pages. Unsurprisingly, we received more answers on this questionnaire as we have more adult friends on Facebook. The most popular age group that answered the questionnaire was 18-24, we would have liked more results from people that are older, but the results we received worked well in our documentary. Next time, we should use alternative methods in order to get the questionnaire to older people. We could hand out physical copies to the lecturers in NPTC and our parents/grandparents at home. This would give the primary research a wider range of answers that could have given us a slightly better insight into how the older generations feel about YouTube.

In conclusion, I think the primary research we managed to gather played a significant role in the documentary. Because of this research we were able to find out what YouTubers we should be researching into further. These YouTubers were Logan Paul and Jake Paul who were both a large topic in the documentary. I think next time to gather this research I would have liked to interview children in person and play that in one of the sections in the documentary.

Secondary Research

Once we had decided on creating a documentary about YouTube I began with my research. We decided our documentary would fall under the category ‘screen life’. Since this was our project starter, I decided to look into how reliant humanity is on technology and came across an article about children using mobile phones and aimlessly using YouTube.

This article was helpful as it mentioned YouTube and children, which is one of our topics. Although this article proved that YouTube and technology have a large influence over children, I think I could have looked into more statistics and facts in order to back this research up more.

I then decided to look into different documentary modes, this was extremely helpful and gave me a better understanding of how types of documentaries work. After learning about what the documentary modes were, I then decided to look into a documentary that uses the expository mode, which is the mode I believed we would be using. Looking at this documentary gave me some helpful tips and tricks on what to include when I use any pictures or videos in my own.

As discussed in my primary research section, learning that children enjoy Logan Paul and Jake Paul and adults have a negative opinion about them, it motivated us to research further into the Paul brothers. Since my section of the documentary is ‘The Influence on Kids’ I decided to look into Jake Paul. Taking a closer look at Jakes videos, channel statistics, controversies and personal life gave me a better insight as to why two generations have completely opposite opinions on him. After looking more into Jakes YouTube statistics using the website social blade, it offered an in depth analysis of Jakes channel through the years. When going through this, I saw the dip in viewership and subscriber growth for Jake when he was involved in controversies. The research I conducted on Jake Paul took me longer than expected and I fell slightly behind on my project plan. To get myself back on track with my project plan I put more hours during the night to complete this section, which got me back on track.

As well as conducting research on Jake Paul, we all thought it would be a good idea to look into less controversial YouTubers who maintain a family friendly image. I looked into Bird Keeper Toby for two reasons, the first one being because his content is family friendly and the second one being because Toby is the YouTuber who agreed to be interviewed for the documentary. Toby runs successful YouTube channel with over 200,000 subscribers. After looking into Toby’s past videos and his social blade statistics, I was able to determine that maintaining a family friendly image is helpful to your career as it’s more likely that brands will want to work with you and you’re able to obtain different types revenue this way.

Not only did I need to look into different YouTubers, I needed to get n understanding of documentaries. I began by looking at the documentary modes distinguished by Bill Nichols. Looking into the different documentary modes and researching closer into a documentary gave me a better understanding of how the production side of documentaries work.

If I was to do this again, I would use a range of different sources for my research. Although I did obtain research from books, movies, YouTube videos and articles, I feel like the number of research I did for these sources wasn’t as equal as they could have been. For example, I only looked into one book written by two YouTubers. I think at the beginning I thought looking into books wouldn’t be helpful because YouTube is based online, but my prejudgement was definitely wrong and the one book I looked into was very insightful and helped with the documentary.

Research in Practice

Since I was given the task of creating the title sequence, I began looking into different animations created in Adobe After Effects. As I wasn’t that familiar with animating, this section helped me tremendously with learning the different elements within After Effects.

Practice 1

I had an idea of including polaroid images within the title sequence, so I looked up how I would do this

I used YouTube tutorials to guide me in creating a rough edit and it helped tremendously. Using these tutorials educated me further on using the software After Effects.

Practice 2

As well as the title sequence, I wanted there to be animations used throughout the documentary. I then looked into creating a drone-like map effect using After Effects. I used one tutorial to follow and my result wasn’t the best, but doing it gave me a better understanding on what I need to do in the future.

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Practice 3

I also researched into how to create a glitch text. I wanted the glitch text to be a staple piece throughout the documentary and I needed to text creating it before hand.

All of these animations I practiced required a lot of attention to detail and without practicing them in my research stage I know I would have fallen behind and got frustrated during post production.

Idea Generation

When trying to decide on what we would do for our project, we came up with the idea of creating a documentary about YouTube. We came to this decision because we are all avid users of the platform. We then began to pitch names for the documentary and in the end we came up with ‘YouTube: Beyond The Screen’. Before we could begin generating more ideas, we needed to decide who our target audience is going to be. We each agreed that our target audience would not be children as we wanted the documentary to be educational and informative. When working in a group, it’s not always smooth sailing and people tend to disagree with each other, but we were lucky at this point as we were all in agreement. In order to brainstorm ideas I created a mind map, on this mind map I put in everything we could potentially talk about in the documentary.

After we all created our mind maps, we decided that we would split the documentary into different sections in order to separate our work. We came up with different section titles and assigned them to each other. My main section title was ‘The Influence on Kids’. I then began to create a mind map specifically for this section and within this mind map, I discussed the positive and negative effects that YouTube and YouTubers have on children.

Upon creating these mind maps, I learned what YouTubers I need to research in depth and what YouTube videos I should be looking at. Knowing this, I then created a mood board which shows what I will be using and what I intend on creating throughout the process. After hearing that creating a documentary was popular amongst our peers and a lot of people were planning on creating one too, we knew we had to have a unique selling point. We then realised that there is a YouTube Space in London, so we jumped on the opportunity immediately and booked a creator day for April 17th. After completing the idea generation process, we were confident in our project idea. We thought we could sustain a sufficient amount of research and produce an interesting documentary that stood out from the rest.

These mind maps were helpful for me to refer back to when I was completing my research. They gave me a reminder of what I needed to be looking into in my secondary research section. As you can see, in the larger mind map, I’ve included viral videos that I did research on and the controversies I looked into in the final edit. The smaller mind map which was constructed around my section was very helpful in reminding me about why these particular YouTubers are perceived as bad. Laying out my ideas in the form of a mind map was important to me because at any given time I could look back and recall what I needed to do and how I could elaborate on it.

Pre-Production

In my group I was assigned the task of writing up the pre-production paper work. So with this task in mind, I began creating the pre production paperwork ahead of schedule. I did this to ensure the paperwork was complete before we went to the YouTube Space. This was because our first production day was fairly quick into the FMP, which meant I needed to be fast with the paperwork.

As a group, collectively we booked out the YouTube Space in London. We bought Megabus tickets and found a time and date that was suitable for each of us to go to London. This needed to be done first as all of the pre production paper work is centred around our location on production day. We all wrote out an itinerary for the day after we had our tickets. This itinerary was helpful for us to understand what we would needed to do at each hour.

Equipment List

The first thing I did on my own was write up the equipment list, I thought this was essential as we needed to plan exactly what we needed to take to London. If we had forgotten anything that was crucial, it could have ruined a production day that we wouldn’t have been able to repeat. I also did this first because we needed to book equipment out from the college. The day we were going was during half term, so we needed to acquire this equipment before half term began.

Location Recce and Risk Assessment

I then wrote out the location recce for London which included a photograph of the area, a satellite image, and a written statement saying what scenes would be filmed here. I then moved on to the risk assessment of this area in order to determine what hazards we may encounter while travelling to London and while we were there. Doing this made me and my group aware of things that could go wrong and made us more alert to these potential hazards, which would help us avoid them.

Call Sheet

I created a call sheet which explained everything my team needed to know about production day. The call sheet included the time and date, the time and location we would be meeting, the location, the expected weather on the day and the equipment we would be using. This sheet was helpful to have before hand because if anyone needed to know any information, they could just refer back to the call sheet.

Budget and Cost

Most students production days were free since this is a college project and the equipment is provided without a cost. We were travelling to London, so our production day was not free. I created a list of expenses during the trip and the total for all three of us came to £198.75. Although we could have done something else that would require no money for the documentary, we wanted to get out of our comfort zones and create something that was unique from the rest. We all agreed that the money we used for the project would be worth it in the final result.

Script and Storyboard

The last two things that were created in the pre-production stage was the script and the storyboard. Unlike the other paperwork, this paperwork takes longer to complete.

At this stage, we all knew what sections we were editing, so we decided to script our sections individually. After our sections were scripted, we met up at Dans house in order to script the remaining parts of the documentary. We then scripted what each of us were going to be saying, but this part of the scripting process was more in a unified team. I preferred when we scripted together as we could all bounce ideas off each other and help each other out when necessary.

I then created a storyboard using Adobe Photoshop. The storyboard I created included the type of visuals we wanted to produce, the time scale of the sections, and the audio that was going to be used.

Overall, the pre-production stage went smoothly and because of this I don’t believe there is anything we could improve on. The paperwork was completed ahead of schedule, it had all the necessary information and it became a help to all three of us when moving on to the production stage.

Production

Our main production day was when we went to the YouTube Space in London. We did have a few other days that we recorded visuals and audio during the production process.

1. Our thoughts on YouTube before the documentary.
2. Interviewing Bird Keeper Toby.
3. Going to YouTube Space London
4. Recording Narration.
5. Our thoughts on YouTube after the documentary.

Our Thoughts on YouTube Before the Documentary

This production day was one of the simple ones. We took my personal camera into the studio and recorded our unscripted opinions about YouTube.

This section was the only part of the documentary that was opinion based. We always wanted our documentary to remain as objective as possible, but we also wanted to show the viewers what our pre-judgements on YouTube were. If we were to do something similar to this in the future, I would have made sure our answers were longer and at one point towards the end included all three of us in the frame discussing YouTube as a whole.

Interviewing Bird Keeper Toby

We had scheduled a time and date to interview YouTuber Bird Keeper Toby over webcam.

We went into the interview with a list of questions to ask Toby and the interview turned out really well. Toby’s answers fit really well into the documentaries narrative and he was entertaining and informative as well. I think as a group we were professional and friendly when asking Toby questions and we got everything we wanted out of the interview and more. If I had to change anything, I think if we had more time we could have met up with Toby and interviewed him in person since he lives in England. I did however like the quality of the screen recording and thought the interview was a nice pace.

Going to YouTube Space London

On the 17th April 2019 we went to the YouTube Space in London. We arrived at London Victoria Coach station at 5am.

After arriving in London, we began filming every possible thing we could. We wanted more footage than we needed in case we needed it later on. The YouTube Space doors opened at 10am and we sat down in the cafe at the front of the building.

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Surrounding us was various different YouTubers, either in business meetings, working on projects, or editing their videos. At this point we had been in the YouTube Space for awhile and hadn’t been able to acquire anyone to interview. We were originally hoping to interview staff there, but there was only one woman who was in this area of the building and she was working as the receptionist. We then decided that because there were so many YouTubers around us, we would ask them if we could interview them. After doing so, we were able to interview five different YouTubers. The only problem we ran into here was how loud the music was, given that this was a public area, we weren’t able to ask anyone to turn off the music. As well as that, there were a lot of people coming and going which meant we had a lot of background noise. Unfortunately, one of the YouTubers we interviewed didn’t make the final cut because the music was too loud over him talking and there was nothing we could do to resolve it.

We took a Rode Shotgun mic with us to London, but if we had taken a boom mic then we would have been able to get close enough to the subject which would have ultimately eliminated the background noise.

As you can see in the pre-production London itinerary, in London we wanted to interview the public and ask for their opinions on YouTube. We were supposed to do this at 1:30pm, unfortunately our time in the YouTube Space lasted longer than we originally thought which resulted in us not interviewing any of the public.

Although interviewing the public would have been a nice touch to the documentary, not including these types of interviews wasn’t detrimental to our finished product. Interviewing five YouTubers was unbelievable and we were happy to sacrifice interviewing the public in order to spend the extra time in the YouTube Space to interview the extra YouTubers. In my opinion, we made the right decision for our documentary.

Recording Narration

When it came to recording our narration we wanted to use the college studio. We took the time to book the studio during one of our audio lessons. Since every media and music student were eager to use the studio due to deadlines approaching, we only had this two hour slot to get our narration perfect.

Unfortunately for us, on the day of recording, we ran into several different issues in the studio. The first 10 minutes usually involves setting up the computers, speakers and equipment, but we ran into problems with connecting the microphone to the mixing desk. Attempting to resolve this issue ate into a lot more time than we wanted and we were left with just over an hour left to record. Once this issue had subsided, we opened up Audacity in the studio and attempted to record test pieces, however the programme was not picking up any sound waves, again after trying to resolve this and eventually opening up Logic Pro X instead, we were left with very little time to record a lot of narration. As the end of our session neared, we decided there wasn’t any point in recording anything as all of the issues resulted in us not having enough time to even test the audio levels. This left our group in quite a bad situation as there were no other time slots to book the studio and we needed to get the narration recorded in order to begin our edits. To over come this issue, we put our problem-solving skills to use and decided we would record our narration the next day at Dans house. Dan has a professional microphone and we had as much time as we needed to record the narration on that day.

We were worried that we would be behind on schedule giving the issues we had at the college studio, but quickly coming up with a solution and getting the narration recorded the next day put us right on track.

Our Thoughts on YouTube After Documentary

Again, just like the recording our thoughts before the documentary section, this section was one of the more simple ones. The process was exactly the same, using the studio, lighting and my camera to record ourselves.

Much like the other section, this one was also opinion based and was unscripted. If given the chance to do this again, I would have changed the location and had us all in frame at one point discussing what our current thoughts are. I liked the white background at first, but if we recorded in a bedroom it would give the audience more of a YouTuber setting and would relate to the documentary story.

Post Production

Post production was definitely the longest part for me. I used Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop to complete my edit. The first thing I had to do was arrange all of the footage we had taken during production into their own personal folders, which included the good takes and the bad takes. Doing this helped me a lot when I began my edit as everything was easy to locate and didn’t take up valuable time. Something I can improve on next time would be to set up a folder for the third party content I downloaded. As majority of the documentary included various different YouTube videos and screenshots, after downloading these I didn’t arrange them in any way and they sat in different sections on my laptop which made them hard to locate when editing.

Title Sequence

The next thing I did was start my title sequence. This title sequence went through a few different stages, but the end product was worth it. I began with just the polaroid images against the background. I also had the “Beyond The Screen” title in one of the polaroids during the first draft.

I then decided that I didn’t like this as I felt the documentary name deserved it’s own section of the title sequence. I came up with the idea of putting the name into an old TV screen and have it turn off before the polaroid images come into it. I liked the old screen as it fit in with my glitching text idea.

Now that I had my title sequence, I wanted to take it a step further and text my abilities in After Effects. I thought that doing this could be a risk and make me fall behind on schedule, but it was something I really wanted to do. I began watching various different tutorials in order to learn how to animate something entirely different, again this was a time risk because I wasn’t able to practice this during the research stage and began creating the real thing with no prior knowledge or practice. After spending a few hours on this edit, I knew it was coming together well and didn’t stop until I had finished it. The animation only took me a night to complete and didn’t make me fall behind on my schedule.

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In the last animation I did, which was the YouTube play button, It reveals the TV glitching animation. I had to import the finished TV glitch edit in After Effects and attach it to the second edit. This was something I was happy to do as it would show me if the two animations fit together properly. After seeing that they worked well, I exported it and in Premiere Pro I added in the polaroid edit to the end of the title sequence. This whole edit was quite time consuming and if I was more organised next time and decided on everything I needed to do for the title sequence before hand, I wouldn’t have made so many changes that could have effected my schedule.

The Glitch Text

I then created the different section titles that were used to introduce the next topic of discussion. I used the glitch text for each of these title sections in order to keep the same theme throughout the documentary. Since we were all editing different sections separately, it could have looked like the different edits didn’t belong together, but this theme of glitching text tied everything together.

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I think this worked really well throughout and is one of my favourite parts of the documentary. As this was my first time creating glitching text, now that I am more familiar with the techniques, next time I can challenge myself more and make the text look less basic.

The History of YouTube Edit

As this was the second edit I was assigned, but the one that starts the documentary, I wanted to include various different animations to make the viewers immediately interested. In my research in practice section, I was able to practice creating a done-like map effect, so I knew that this was something I wanted to include straight away as it’s snappy and good to look at. I was able to achieve a much better look on the actual edit than I did on my practice and this really pleased me. This then cemented what I already knew, that without the practice, the animations would not have been that great and would have resulted in frustrations during the most crucial stage.

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Looking at the two edits, you can see a significant difference in them both. My practice edit is lacking in quality, and you can see where the lines are on the different parts of the map. The official edit is bright in colour, is good quality for what it is and you can’t see any joining lines. The text and the map pin are placed better in the official one as well. This further proves that practice is essential when you want to create something out of your comfort zone.

If I was to critique something in this section, it would definitely be the stock images used. The images worked well with what was being said, but I personally didn’t like how they would just play without a transition between. I felt this part could have been executed better and if I was given the chance again, I would have done things differently. I know next time that I will want to use various transitions that fit the scene in order to make going from one stock image to the next less boring.

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I used an image I created in Photoshop and then animated in After Effects during this section as well. This edit was something I had no practice on and was a spur of the moment decision when listening to the narration.

I liked the idea of creating the YouTube page and being able to do whatever I want to it. I wanted to include on the side the other types of viral videos and I was able to create a zoom into the view count that was high quality and appealing to watch.

The Influence on Kids Edit

This was my main edit. Much like the other sections I was responsible for editing, I included some animations. A lot of the animations I created in this stage I haven’t discussed or gone into too much detail about because of their simplicity.

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The first two of the screenshots above were created in After Effects. I wanted to show a visual of Jake Paul and Logan Paul moving from Vine to YouTube. This animation only lasts a few seconds, so I do wish this animation was in my mind before we recorded the narration, as I would have said my narration slightly slower in order for the audience to see the full effect of the animation.

The second screenshot you see was created in both Photoshop and After Effects. I liked how this one turned out because it introduces the person and the country he lives in through the visuals and the audio. Using the British flag was something I wanted to do because it will relate to the British audience that will be watching the documentary.

The last one was created in Premiere Pro using the position keyframes. Again, this one was just introducing the people to the screen in a slightly different way.

Although these animations are simple, I think they were effective in the sections I put them in as it was a change from the stock footage and stock images that were usually in the edit. Next time I want to plan out the animations I want to create before I begin editing. I came up with a lot of them on the spot and when creating them I did fear that I would be behind on my schedule.

Audio

The audio edit was assigned to Dan and he had to edit our narration for the documentary. I believe Dan did a great job in editing the audio, and we were all very pleased with the outcome of it.

When the whole documentary was edited and we pieced our final edits onto one timeline, we all decided on background music and sound effects. We scoured through YouTubes royalty free music and found music that matched the mood of the sections. Finding music that matched and was royalty free did prove to be difficult, but we managed to find what we were looking for after a lot of time. In order to keep consistency, we made the title sequence music fade onto the History of YouTube section, and we repeated some of the songs when appropriate. I believe we did a very good job in selecting music, and choosing it at the end together when the edit was done rather than individually throughout was a smart move as it made the documentary seem more professional with each sections music linking together.

Screening

I screened the final draft of the documentary to three of my lecturers. I began by going through my context page in order to explain what the documentary was about and why I decided to work in a group. After screening the documentary they then gave us feedback. The following is the positive and negative points they gave us.

Positive

Once the lecturers had watched the documentary, they mainly had positive things to say. They claimed that they enjoyed the pace of the documentary and that they could see that a lot of effort had been put into creating it. They thought the documentary seemed high quality and the overall edit was slick. Regarding our interviews, we were initially worried that they would pick up on the background noise at the YouTube Space, but they said that having the background noise gave it a natural public interview feel. They also liked the colouring of the documentary, especially the use of bright colours during my section ‘The Influence on Kids’, this is because the bright imagery matches the YouTube kids genre. Another thing they liked about the documentary was the consistency throughout, using the glitch text all the way through. Although one lecturer did question why it was a glitch effect when YouTube is modern, after explaining to him it was because it’s a popular effect vloggers use today he really liked the concept. They enjoyed that we spoke about the darker side of YouTube in regards to youtube controversies (Logan Paul suicide forest) but the main thing we were complimented on was that we were able to keep an upbeat tone and didn’t upset the mood as we were strategic with what we were showing on screen. One of the lecturers liked that I used Morgz as an example of a controversial YouTuber because he is British and it can relate to the audience and give them a close to home feeling. We were praised on how well the audio was, especially given the issues we had during production with audio. They liked how the audio remained the same volume throughout and that it was clear to hear what we were saying. As well as that, one of them picked up on the background music and thought it was great. They said that the subtleness of the music tied the documentary together and it wasn’t distracting. To finish off, they liked the end credits we used with the bloopers and thought it was a unique touch.

Negative

Even though the majority of things they discussed were positive, they did have some constructive criticism for us. One of the lecturers spoke about how the polaroid part of the title sequence was too slow for their liking. As well as this, they thought because we scripted our individual sections separately, that we needed more communication during this process. This is because during my section, ‘The Influence on Kids’ I talk about Logan Paul and his suicide forest controversy. Then in Cheye’s section, he also talks about this topic but they felt as if it was being introduced for the second time as though it was new information, instead of being continued on from the previous section. They thought when we talk about our unique selling point in the documentary, it made it seem as if our target audience was the lecturers marking the work. This is something I personally didn’t pick up on when we were scripting or recording, but it has made me think that I need to pay closer attention to detail next time I do this. Another thing they disliked was some of the screens becoming black during parts of the documentary. I know during some of my edit I included a black screen with a quote underneath and audio playing over, I thought this was unique and a clever way to move on to the next part of the edit, but next time I will think whether or not the imagery is important and should be there too.

We did receive some constructive criticism, but the lecturers thought this criticism was something to take on board the next time we work on a project, rather than having us go back and make changes to the final edit.

Final Evaluation

Overall, me and my group managed to achieve what we set out to do. We created a 32 minute short documentary that we were all very proud of. We managed to answer the main question of the documentary which was can YouTube be a career. We saw the effects that YouTube has on children and how controversies surrounding larger YouTubers often get swept under the rug and the actions of these YouTubers overshadow the positive actions of other smaller YouTubers. From the beginning, we wanted to be as objective as possible, but after the completing the documentary and hearing feedback, I do believe we weren’t as object as we initially thought. When discussing Jake Paul and Logan Paul, I only spoke about the negative controversies they had been involved in. I think if I was to do this again, I would research more into the positive things they have done on YouTube. In my mind map, I do have a section where I wrote about the positive impacts YouTubers have on children, but in my section ‘The Influence on Kids’, I don’t discuss any of these positive things, suggesting I’m not being as fair and objective as I wanted to be. I also agree with the lecturers when they said they felt as if the Logan Paul suicide forest discussion was repeated, rather than reintroduced. I know the problem was insufficient communication, so if I was to work with people again and do individual edits, I will ensure we communicate as much as possible and script the sections together to avoid any repetitiveness. Even though during our primary research we managed to get a sufficient amount of results from the survey, which led to us heavily discussing Logan Paul and Jake Paul in the documentary, my regret is that we didn’t do these interviews in person. It was difficult to get responses from children online, but since we each have younger family members we could have recorded them answering the survey in person. Since we had issues with our primary research because Dwr-y-Felin said no to the classroom interview, we did fall behind on our schedule but putting our heads together and coming up with a relevant solution allowed us to get back on track. I do wish we didn’t immediately assume that Dwr-y-Felin would say yes to us interviewing their students as creating the questionnaire and PowerPoint was time consuming and we could have put that time into other research. Thankfully, we did recycle some of the questions we were planning on asking these students and put them into our online questionnaire which didn’t make the first process entirely useless. Regarding secondary research, I believe I researched into everything I needed to in order to complete my sections of the documentary. Researching into the different documentary modes and looking into a documentary gave me a new insight into the production side of a documentary. Looking into different types of YouTubers and different styles of videos helped me understand YouTube on a different level. Because of this research, I was able to construct my section ‘The Influence on Kids’ with a lot of knowledge on YouTubers who’s main demographic is children. Looking into different YouTubers views and statistics helped me understand the money aspect of YouTube.

Overall, this project has taught me a variety of different skills that I did not possess before hand. As stated in my rationale, the first seven units allowed me to learn the basics of the Adobe software and become more comfortable. After completing this project, I’ve learned several new skills and acquired a better understanding on how editing and animation works. After Effects was a software that I wanted to master after previously using it to create a basic title sequence in another unit, watching tutorials and requesting advice from lecturers has helped me advance my skills in After Effects during the FMP. This project tested my time management skills as I had created a schedule I intended on following from the beginning. Sticking to this schedule was difficult on times as the project took different turns and I came up with new ideas, but overall I managed to complete my work during the time period I wanted to. Not only that, working on such a large project with two other people tested my team work skills. When working in a team, it’s not always easy to agree on everything and understand where the other people are coming from, but we chose each other because we knew we worked well together and always listened to each others ideas. The only issues we had as a team was not communicating enough when we were scripting our individual parts, but we all agree that not doing it together was a mistake and next time we will be sure to pay closer attention to each section of the script, together. During this project, I did encounter several different problems and at the time they were very challenging and frustrating, especially the college studio issue, but we were able to overcome them in a fast and professional manner in order to not fall behind. The final piece we produced is something we all worked tirelessly on and seeing the results and the feedback is something we’re all very proud of.

Final Product:

Below you can view the final product that was shown to our lecturers.