[This is from my second channel, I got lucky with this thumbnail, my second video not so much]
I see a lot of videos and articles discussing how to start up a YouTube channel, the vast majority of which come from channels that are already somewhat successful. This makes a lot of sense, but because they all come from the same (often older) perspective there are some elements that get passed over. Something I wish I knew before I started 3 YouTube channels (1 for my band, 2 personal) was that YouTube only allows you to verify 2 channels of of the same phone number. I verified my band's channel (we plan on possibly writing songs over 15 minutes, so that's important) and my primary personal channel covering topics similar (or ripped straight from) this blog. Unfortunately my 2nd personal channel now cannot be verified and the biggest problem I have there (apart from being unable to upload 15 minute plus videos) is that I can't add custom thumbnails, a bigger deal it seems to me than any other restriction. So in light of my recent lack of forward planning I thought I'd put together a short list for anyone looking to start a channel in 2016.
I made a video from my favourite piece on this blog, the one on Art, Porn, Commercialisation, Kill La Kill and Cashback, This took ages and is the second time I uploaded the thing (thanks to automated systems that flag videos for copyrighted content which, although fair enough, gets abused by companies to avoid negative or non-profitable videos and fair use laws aren't upheld), I'd really appreciate it if you gave it a look and dropped some feedback; that helps immensely.
I was once told that I shouldn’t keep making art or music
unless it was making me money. To this day I don’t understand the thinking
behind that. I’ve always been a work to live kind of guy and because I don’t
spend much money my current “job” teaching kids to play drums at a local
primary school as well as part time employment for a local T-shirt manufacturer
is enough (although this is only because I live with my parents so of course
I’m mooching off of them and not truly supporting myself, I’m not deluding
myself into thinking this is actually enough work to live off of). When I
started to tell people I wanted to be more serious about making art and making
music people asked me “Is that what you want to be, an artist/musician?” and my
answer was always no, I didn’t want to “be” an artist, I just wanted to
continue drawing, painting etc. I didn’t want to be a musician, I just wanted
to continue making music.
[Edit]
The old video is pretty awful, and although I had fun with it I don't
really want it to represent my work, the link still works, but the video
is unlisted and has now been replaced with a new one that's a lot more
serious and now includes relevant gameplay. I think the improvement
between the two is pretty tangible, but it's still not perfect and I'd
love feedback. The new video is embedded below. [End Edit]
I made a YouTube video, this is the script I was originally going of, I changed things a bit in the resultant video - see the video here or in the embedded video below and give me some feedback if you can, I'd like to know if the style of comedy I'm going for is interesting to anyone. Just don't complain about the Cicadas. I know about the cicadas.
I recently started for the second time to play Fallout 3.
The first time I tried to play as a male avatar, one that looked like me.
Within an hour I gave up on that first play through. On my second attempt
however I made a female avatar and have probably sunk around 20 hours into the
game with this character thus far, despite not being particularly partial to
open world games. At first I wasn’t sure why I seemed to be instantly more
invested with a female avatar, the Jennifer Hale is a better voice actor
argument doesn’t work for a silent protagonist, but I think at least part of
the reason lies in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. In Dreamfall you play as
Zoe, and Zoe was the first playable character I truly felt invested in within a
video game, in some ways I think that investment carried over into other female
protagonists.
Undertale is the best game I have ever played. While it may only be subjectively better than all the other games I’ve yet had the pleasure
to play there is a particular reason that I think it’s the best game I’ve come
across. People have cited the characters, the music, the writing and even
sometimes the art style as the reason they fell in love with the game. All of
those elements are fantastic but one of the least lauded aspects is the reason
Undertale stands above the likes of Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid and Team
Fortress 2 in my eyes, and that’s actually the gameplay.
If it weren’t for a late play through of the incredible Undertale David Szymanski’s The Music Machine would be my pick for
game of the year for 2015 (admittedly I played very few new releases but
beating out the likes of the excellent The
Beginners Guide is no small feat). Clever writing, incredible aesthetic,
horrifying environments and subtly intelligent game design all combine to make
for a fantastic game that sadly hasn’t seen anywhere near as much praise as I
believe it deserves. Why does it deserve so much praise? Read on to get my view
on one of the more intelligent and unique takes on horror (in any form) I’ve
ever experienced.
Avatar: The Last Airbender returns to form in episode six;
if Warriors of Kyoshi was Sokka’s episode this episode (Imprisoned) is Katara’s.
Although not hitting the peaks of episodes 3 and 4 this episode is of the
quality I associate with the series. The humour remains solid and consistent,
the characters are charming and the animation is a lot nicer than it was in the
last episode. Introduced to the show is another minor character: Haru. Haru’s
mother is quickly introduced alongside the situation the village is in under
the occupation of the Fire nation. This sets the stage for the rest of the episode.
Earthbending is a punishable form of potential resistance against
the occupying fire nation troops and as such Haru is quickly imprisoned after
rescuing an old man trapped under rubble. Katara who felt responsible for
having urged Haru to earthbend the man to safety subsequently gets herself
arrested to rescue him. The rig upon which the prison is based is built entirely out of
metal and the design is excellent, the series has always been good at
making oppressive metal constructions and the art team does a great job with
the colouring and texturing. Here Haru’s father is also introduced and after
Katara fails to convince the earthbenders to rebel, even if they cannot bend, the
team develop a plan.
The culmination of this plan results in blowing a load of
coal out to the prisoners, adapting a plan developed earlier that allowed, with
some help from Aang, Katara to appear to be earthbending. After this a fight
ensues with the earthbenders swiftly defeating the firebenders. Unfortunately
the fight itself is a touch underwhelming; one has the feeling that the plan
for the fight was constrained by the time and money the team could put into its
production. Rather than cleverly playing with the potential of a fight in which
the earthbender’s ammunition is flammable the episode only briefly acknowledges
it and moves on; a little disappointing, but the fighting was not the focus of
the episode.
In the final scene we get what was really missing from the
formula in the last episode and to some small extent in this one as well; Zuko’s
return is teased when he picks up the necklace that Katara lost during the
fight. A touch jammed in perhaps as a cliff-hanger, but no less enjoyable for
it: Zuko is for me the most complex character in the show and his ambitiously
long three season character arc is but one of the elements that sets the show
above all the others I watched as a kid as well as above many of the shows I
enjoy today. It’s always good to see more Zuko.
There’s not a lot more to this episode; it’s quite simple
and doesn’t go too hard on the darker material it had to work with. It certainly
explores corruption and oppression and develops characters within the confines
of such circumstances, but it doesn’t say anything unexpected or new and it
doesn’t really need to, the episode is a good one, even if it doesn’t quite
have the magic that episodes like the 3rd and 4th in the
first series do. It’s always nice to see a show that’s comfortable putting the “main”
or title character into the background the way this episode does; something the
show as a whole is quite good at throughout all of the series.
This line of argument has been swirling around in my mind
for a while and is far too large a topic for me to half-heartedly attempt to
tackle in a single post, so this is the first part of a series of features that
will seek to investigate the boundaries between art and porn and the role
commercialisation can play in the crossing of these boundaries. By no means
will this series be exhaustive of the subject matter, nor will it have
definitive answers to any problems I discuss but I do hope it will provoke
thought on the subject matter.
Edit: I made a video from this post, check it out here. Any feedback you might have would be greatly appreciated.
Firstly it should be noted that by “Art” I’m discussing
forms of culture; be it movies, TV shows or traditional “high” art such as
paintings and sculpture. By the same token “Porn” here refers to anything that
is masturbatory, that is to say anything that is purely pleasurable or
concerned only with gaining a positive emotional or physical reaction. To boil
this distinction down into a crude example I would argue that American Beauty is a piece of culture; a
movie that has great complexity and a barrage of intelligent concepts contained
within, many of which challenge your perception of your own life, while American Pie is masturbatory, concerned
with escapism, gross-out comedy and the wholesale objectification of women in
order to appeal to a teenage male demographic. Subjectivity cannot be stressed
enough here: if you think American Pie
is a brilliant piece of satire or American
Beauty is a pretentious load of wank you aren’t wrong: that’s entirely your
opinion, but so is this article; in all probability you and I will not see eye
to eye and that is not my aim at all. Bear these disclaimers in mind while
reading the rest of this write-up.
The first thoughts I started to have on this topic were
largely formed by two events; the first was doing a week on “Mass Culture
theory” in one of my University courses which argues that with the mass
production of media for commercial purpose media becomes a calculated set of
elements created specifically to be consumed; that it will only reflect and
support the dominant ideas of the most profitable audience and is largely of no
value to society in the way culture had been in the past. I don’t particularly
agree with these assertions but I think in regards to the relationship between profitability
and the likelihood of the value of the art/ culture/ media being lessened the theory
does have a valid and perhaps even important point to make. The other event that
spurred me on to writing these posts was an incredibly disappointing viewing of
Cashback, a film that tried to
advertise itself in the manner of an independent film with big ideas and clever
visuals but utterly failed to meet my already partially sceptical expectations on either point.
Cashback, for
context, follows a man who cannot sleep after his relationship ends badly and
after having nothing better to do starts working night shifts at a supermarket.
In finding the incredible boredom of his job he begins to discover that he can
freeze time which he does in order to partially or wholly undress women in the
store in order to draw them (he is an art student). Tack on to this an awkward
romance and some of the shallowest representations of Women I have ever seen;
particularly on-the-nose given how the film reeks of an appreciation of itself
and how clever the ideas within it are (films like Groundhog Day and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did more or less everything this film tries
to do far better and didn’t make the mistake of making the main character a
wooden plank that makes Daniel Radcliffe look like Daniel Day-Lewis). I went
into this film with a cautious but sceptical optimism thinking the trailer was an
amalgamation of all the worst parts designed to sell the film to people
uninterested in the arthouse style it claimed to be a part of, an average
trailer for an interesting movie, sadly the film was ultimately less
interesting than the trailer and as a short-ish film of ~98 minutes one that
astoundingly manages to say only what might have fit into a 3 minute YouTube
video. Suffice to say I don’t recommend it.
Of course to imply that it was commercialisation that made
the film as disappointing as it was would be naïve and plain stupid; but it
certainly played a part. Cashback’s
sensitive-artist-type protagonist is only interested in drawing attractive women
and exclusively in a realistic style in black and white, pencil on paper.
Fundamentally it shows very little understanding of art (the only art ever
shown in a movie where two of the characters are students of an art school is
in the exact same realistic pencil on paper style that in a real art school
would be far from the only style represented) and in exclusively portraying
attractive female subjects the film starts to lean on an offensively limited
view of art as just visually pleasing, exclusively concerned with the skill of
the artist and totally removed from any sort of vision; a type of art that I
consider masturbatory and unappealing to my own sensitive-artist-type
sensibilities and the less said on the female characters and their roles as
plot-points for the male characters the better. Of course it would be far less
attractive to audiences if the film stripped the male patrons, but as a film
about the pursuit of beauty isn’t it awful that the film only shows it in naked
supermodels? I could be wrong; maybe all the supermodels shop at night and the
film is totally accurate but I very much doubt it and the complete exclusion of
the average shopper, men or even women of any other ethnicity than Caucasian
further reinforces a particular image of beauty; playing exclusively off of an
exclusively hetero-centric white male perspective and the result is not art in
the slightest as it may hope to be, but rather a self-indulgent love letter to
a teenage obsession with women as an object of desire. Just as the women of the
film are there to be looked at and appreciated for their beauty (and nothing
else) the film offers nothing beyond breast flavoured eye candy.
So if Cashback was
a film that advertised itself as smart and arty but ended up being anything but
my next example is its antithesis; Kill
La Kill an anime series I’ve already praised here advertises itself as focused on action with a pretty
heavy emphasis on girls fighting in very little clothing but ultimately became
my favourite anime and one of the most enjoyable series I have ever watched with
a lot more to say than it appears at first glance. If beauty is only skin deep then Kill La Kill certainly looked shallow, but as you sink deeper you
quickly realise the glimmer of the surface was merely a reflection of your own
expectations (I certainly did not expect to particularly like Kill La Kill but it surprised me in just
about every way possible) and the show itself is much more nuanced than that
which one immediately sees or indeed expects to see.
Kill La Kill has a
similar focus on the female form to Cashback,
and you will see repeated shots of all the main characters in skimpy clothing,
however just about everything that Cashback
does poorly or fails to do at all is done by Kill La Kill: both men and women are shown practically naked and
the framing isn’t one that places the revealing positions characters are placed
in to be disempowering; but rather one where women have equal power to the male
characters (in Cashback the women are
frozen and undressed at the hands of the man, in Kill La Kill characters for the most part chose to dress in
revealing clothing, actually gaining power from doing so and men and women
alike wear very little). It all has a point too, something I can’t say about Cashback, with statements about Japanese culture in regards to censorship and an extreme focus on education in
particular areas being particular examples of elements of Japanese culture that
is being directly criticised by the show. On top of all of this it is a powerhouse
of feminist critique of cultural issues regarding how women and men are judged
and treated differently with clever nods to the way students might modify their
uniforms to carry this message. People might bring up the hem of their skirt or
wear a shirt that is too small for them to accentuate their body and Kill La Kill doesn’t judge that action
but rather celebrates it in the most over-the-top way it can; shoving our
judgement back in our face and showing how stupid it is. Chris Kincaid wrote a
great piece on this particular topic at Japan Powered, if you’re interested in
feminism and Kill La Kill it’s a good
read, check it out here. If you don't know anything about Kill La Kill check out this trailer to be totally misinformed on the show (although it's not that bad of a trailer despite its inaccuracy).
Where Cashback
fails to say anything important Kill La
Kill says everything it wants to, presenting important ideas and messages
in a way that is entertaining and enjoyable for both their audience members that
might agree with their ideals and those that might not; whether you think women
should dress moderately or you think women shouldn’t be told how to dress Ryuko
is an incredible and instantly likeable character; whether you think
capitalistic desires, possessions and clothing bring you happiness or you think
that material goods only get in the way of forming true happiness Mako’s family
are as charming and kind to you as they are to Ryuko herself and whether or not
you believe that certain rigid education systems are harmful to their students
and even their students’ families the institution of Honnouji academy is
fantastically oppressive as a school. Kill
La Kill rides the line perfectly between what I consider to be art and what
has clearly been shown to be commercially successful and stands as a very
strong argument against Mass Culture theory for its ability to slip in
subversive messages into a series that appears to aim itself at the very people
that might hold many of the views the show criticises.
Art for me has to do two things; one is to demonstrate an
element of technical ability and the other is to have a message or set of
messages that the audience will grapple with; all technical ability and no
message and you’ll get a realistic portrait like those featured in Cashback; all message and no technical
skill and you’ll get a blog post *cough cough*. Kill La Kill hits both marks perfectly; the art direction is B E A
U T I F U L and the editing, music, dialogue, characters and ideas all live up
to the wonderful visuals. Porn on the other hand, or rather masturbatory
material in this case, has to show me a lot of shots of nude women (for the
audience at large whatever gender etc. is their thing) with no message and
nothing to think about to get in the way of the pleasure of the piece and while
there might just be enough in the way
of ideas to make it a stretch to call Cashback
porn, for me it was purely masturbatory (not in the sense that it works as porn, but that it was little more than a weak romance and lots of nudity); deliberately leaving the more
interesting ideas unexplored to leave room for more shots of naked women and right there's the reason I was so disappointed with Cashback; with more development it could have been a half decent film but it instead chose to cram in as much nudity as possible without ever remembering to have a reason for doing so.
So, that’s it for this post, the ones that follow will
likely look more into the commercialisation aspect of my argument, this one
didn’t dig into that side too much. I also expect to be digging into some
traditional “high” art and perhaps some of the ways in which art appreciation
and distribution has changed and the effect this has had on the distinctions I
make between valuable culture and masturbatory material. As always if you have any
advice, complaints, tips or opinions please share them with me; I very much
want to improve my writing and feedback either positive or negative would be
greatly appreciated.
