Capturing Content and Creativity

How I use my YouTube channel as a creative outlet and a way to remember

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Inspiration

At the beginning of the 2023–2024 school year, I arrived at the University of Michigan as a new and naive freshman, ready to tackle my first year of college. Like everyone else, I’d heard people say, “Freshman year is the best year of your life,” or “The time will fly by so quickly.” Still filled with the bittersweet feeling of graduating high school just months earlier, I knew these sayings were true, but how do you fight the unending march of time? How can I enjoy moments more or savor my freshman year better? I felt that these tasks were ambiguous, circuitous, and elusive.

During this time, I also began the extremely therapeutic process of journaling. By detailing my emotions, experiences, and elucidations, I could capture moments of my life on paper. Yet, I’d been a video editor for practically half my life. Inspired by video essays from creators like ‘Life of Riza’ or vlogs by Fred Liu, I decided that starting a YouTube channel would be the perfect way to mix my love for filmmaking and videography with my desire to capture and store life, effectively sealing away moments from my freshman year of college and preserving them permanently.

A Rough Start

So, I set out to create my first video — “Being Productive in College” — a video essay inspired by the style of ‘Life of Riza’ where I talked about my initial experiences in college while going about my day on screen. Without a camera, I filmed the entire video on my phone. In fact, I was actually terrified of filming myself in public, so I waited until Thanksgiving break to film the entire video (lol). After publishing the video, I immediately unlisted it when I realized it was quite cringey and a bit cliché. Looking back, the content of the video was not terrible, but the production quality was questionable. The main struggle was my fear of judgment, which held me back from both creating the video and sharing it.

Vlogging

Actually, I had been vlogging for fun since my freshman year of high school, only creating these vlogs for my friends and me to look through. So naturally, I found myself gravitating towards creating vlogs. I found these vlogs to be a much easier way to create videos and film myself in public. After pumping out two or three more really short videos, I started creating vlogs on my various excursions with friends over winter break. At this point, I also acquired my dad’s camera, the Sony ZV-E1, a phenomenal vlogging camera.

When I returned to Michigan in the winter, I created three more videos before spring break — a short vlog with my friends, a vlog at Stanford’s TreeHacks hackathon, and a vlog for my V1 club retreat to Chicago. At this point, I was significantly more confident about filming in public, even though the new camera was much more prominent and drew more attention.

The Big Video

At this point, I wanted to create a big video for my Shift Showcase, and also to try and actually get some subscribers and more views on my channel. So, I set off to create a “Day in the Life of a UMich Student” video. Though intimidating, I filmed throughout the day in front of peers and friends (though mostly when I was alone in my room). I was still petrified of filming in the dining halls, but I managed to get enough footage to create the video. My procrastination was another problem, as editing the video, which realistically needed only about 5 hours, took me 2 months to finish.

After dropping the video, I had some friends from Michigan compliment my channel and videos, which really brought me a lot of joy. I focused a lot more on creating a catchy title and thumbnail.

Post-Shift and Getting Better at This Stuff

After the showcase, I’m continuing to create videos with a larger focus on growing my subscriber and view counts. I created one more video on my finals week at UMich, this time focusing much more on how I created the title and description of the video, and it actually garnered 15k views (as of writing this). This summer, I plan on creating a lot more content related to my travel and time in D.C.