In my last blog post I mentioned how Tim Clark of Life, Explained has kicked off a video production death match between the two of us. Not being content with being the superior blogger, Tim is also looking to win on the video side as well, and started off the war with a very worthy animation about President Dawg.
Be warned - this video does include what some people could interpret as singing and dancing.
Badly.
In other news, the Travelling Book Project is entering its last week of funding before we move on to the next phase - making and sending the books out! If you don't know what I'm talking about, get over to our new website now, find out all about the amazing international phenomenon of the Travelling Book Project, and please do consider sharing the project with your friends, and perhaps even supporting the project via our Indiegogo page. Thanks!
The new website does appear to feature a death star, so all I can assume is that my design skills are equivalent to a nine year old geek. Which is probably about right for my mental age.
And, keeping up to date with the hot topics I was in London today, and there was a tube strike on. This was mainly disconcerting, as I was slightly worried that I wouldn't get to my conference (and back again) in time, but it did have two positives:
a) A lot of people decided not to travel to London, so the train had plenty of space - hi to the seven very nice ladies who cracked open the Bucks Fizz on the way down and had a picnic in the train (and offered it to total strangers such as me!) before spending a day in the capital, and;
b) At Kings Cross there was a big queue to get through the ticket barriers into the underground, and like any good English person there's not much I like more than an unexpected queue! It moved quite quickly as well which cheered me up no end.
True to my country, I love being mildly inconvenienced - it makes you feel as though you've achieved something by merely overcoming the slight challenge.
Anyway, onto my YouTube challenges, which is what I wanted to blog about today.
So, I set myself a bunch of challenges to improve my YouTube videos and channel in 2014, with the first one being to improve my home page, my artwork, all that gubbins.
Well, some of that has actually been done! I have refreshed my artwork (although it is still really bad - I need someone with some sort of talent for artwork and that can understand the YouTube template for channel art to help me! If you have some graphics skills and fancy volunteering let me know!)
I've also started using custom thumbnails for my videos, and you know what - they actually work! They do attract more attention which is great. Plus I made a new channel ad (which also is queued up in the free YouTube Fan Finder programme) so hopefully that will attract more attention too.
If that wasn't enough, I've also learned how to use Audacity to improve the audio on my videos, so fingers crossed there should be a lot less static on my videos in the future.
Time for Challenge 2 in my list of video challenges, and that is to watch other YouTubers! So I'm going to watch as many YouTubers as I possibly can. If you have any channels you particularly recommend, please put them in the comments, or if you want to mention your own channel, do that too!
Finally, I very much hope you've been enjoying my series of interviews with YouTube folk, the last one went live at the weekend, and featured the brilliant Brutall - if you haven't seen his stuff yet go check him out now, you will become addicted to one (if not all) of his video series!
So, I decided to talk about cheese in a bad Northern UK accent.
It isn't my usual accent, honest.
That one is much less intelligible.
So, this is the weekend before I kick off my 2014 Video Challenges, my drive to make my YouTube videos "better"! I'll be blogging a lot more about this over the next weeks and months, one thing I wanted to flag up is that I am hoping to have on my blog some interviews with YouTubers that I really like and subscribe to - so fingers crossed you'll see some in due course!
If you make videos and want to get involved in my challenges, you're very welcome - head over to our Google+ community, and say hi!
UPDATE: I have my first set of answers to interview questions back! Expect them showcased soon!
