Reflecting on Ten Years; 9.25.18
It's been ten years.
Ten years of making dumb skits with friends, short documentaries, filming everyday life, posting shaky concert videos, and vlogging.
In June of 2008 I made my first Youtube Channel, so maybe I'm a little late on this, but wow. Ten years is a HUGE milestone.
RainWaterProductions and the people I worked with on creating dumb videos is what really started me on this life path. I love working with video, audio, and editing. I love doing graphic design, photography, and all other types of digital media. I've written countless amounts of HTML, hosted servers, and ran so many of my own websites over the years.
I don't remember my first video. It's gone forever now, in the abyss of the internet where nothing is really gone forever... And yet, it is.
My original Youtube channel was started in the beginning of what we now recognize as modern internet era. Youtube was in the midst of its third year when I decided to stop watching and start creating. I talked to Youtubers all the time, back before they became who they are today. Ray William Johnson talked to me through messages and comments quite often, and he gave me permission to "remix" his "hit" song Doin' Your Mom. My god it was awful. I'm pretty sure I just ripped his music video from youtube, threw it into Windows Movie Maker, and put another song underneath of it. What the hell did I know? I was like 12. Literally. Anyways, he's coming up on ten million subscribers now. I used to talk to MillyMollyMandy16 who has something like 20k subscribers now. Meanwhile, circa 2008, I had 119 subs and thousands of video views.
Within a year I had over 100 videos uploaded. Thats like 2 a week. I remember making those videos with my friends every single day when we went home from school. It was what we loved to do. I've gotta give a shoutout here to Liz Ring (Capparra, now), Monica Morrisey, and Makayla Aracara. They were my stars.
I remember one time when Liz was staying the night at my house, I had a Christmas wreath hanging outside of my bedroom window. It was late, the lights were out, and we had probably just finished watching a scary movie. Next thing I know Liz is screaming. She scares me half to death and when I ask her what's wrong, she says there's someone staring in the window. So I creep over, slowly, and it looks like there's an outline of a hood... like, an eskimo hood on a winter coat. Nervously we lift up the curtain and -- oh yeah. Christmas wreath. We spent the rest of the night making a 5 minute skit about murderous eskimos and it was probably uploaded by the next morning.
Makayla and I used to skip school. We would stay home and play gamecube, or we would make our own music videos for our favorite songs. One day we made a stop motion video for The Used's "Paralyzed" Get it? Paralyzed? Stop Motion? Hahaha. Man that was a good one. The official music video was also stop motion, and we basically just copied it, but in my house. It took all day to take all of those pictures and edit them together juuuust right. I remember one part of the video I did stop motion of a caterpillar that was in the driveway, and had to wait around outside until I could find a butterfly to photograph, too.
Monica used to just shoot the shit with me. We would screen share ourselves on Chatroulette and Omegle, or just do random vlogs. We loved to do weird stuff on random websites and that actually ended up leading to some friendships. We met Matt Earle on a streaming site where he just went online and played guitar. And we met Ty McAllister on chatroulette, when he told us to put mentos in our diet coke. Nothing happened, because our soda was already flat. So we just drank minty coke and thought that was all that was supposed to happen. Sometimes we would attempt to make our own music, and chronicle our adventures around town.
RainWaterProductions was fun. It was garbage, but it was fun. And then Jessi Slaughter's Dad Called the Cyber Police on me and like that, everything was gone. I had spent the better part of three years uploading so much copyrighted content and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Sure, half of my videos were original content, but the other half was music videos that we made ourselves (using copyrighted music) or movies that I had ripped off the DVD and uploaded for other people to watch (listen I didn't realize how illegal that was okay). And without warning, my entire channel was deleted.
I had just upgraded to a MacBook Pro and didn't even have my old laptop anymore. The 100+ videos I had made the last three years were gone. I tried contacting Youtube, but they said that there was just so much illegal content on my channel that they had skipped giving me three warnings and just deleted it all entirely. I wanted my channel back - my subscribers, my views, my videos. I conceded to deleting anything that wasn't allowed, so long as I could get my original content back. But, there was nothing they could do. Youtube said they had no way of retrieving it and that I was out of luck.
So, I started a new channel. I decided to make it more professional. I started Darrian Dowdy Productions the summer after my Freshman year of highschool and I made sure to do it right this time. I only use royalty free music in my videos and now I stick to serious work, like documentary and freelance. The skits are few and far between but I hope to make more soon. Now, Youtube runs a little differently. You can have copyrighted music for the most part, but, you get a copyright claim filed against you. All this means is that as long as the owner of the content is cool with it, your video can stay up, and it is monetized for the content owner.
Youtube is a whole different game now. Being a Youtuber can even be a career. But that means that the people with millions and millions of subscribers are going to get way more attention than you are.
My Youtube is for personal use and I generally don't make much money, unless my videos lead to freelance work. I have a whopping 22 subscribers (where are my 140 Facebook followers at?!) and about 14,000 views, for a total of over 700 hours.
Ten years of work have boiled down to just about 75 videos currently on my Youtube channel. You can view them here.
Thank you guys so much for ten years of believing in me. If I hadn't started making these videos in 2008, maybe I wouldn't have taken all of those production classes with Chris Panfil in highschool.
Maybe that wouldn't have lead me to going to college for Media Production at Buffalo State. Maybe I wouldn't have graduated as the top student in my major.
Here's to ten more years of having fun and making memories.
Ten years of making dumb skits with friends, short documentaries, filming everyday life, posting shaky concert videos, and vlogging.
In June of 2008 I made my first Youtube Channel, so maybe I'm a little late on this, but wow. Ten years is a HUGE milestone.
RainWaterProductions and the people I worked with on creating dumb videos is what really started me on this life path. I love working with video, audio, and editing. I love doing graphic design, photography, and all other types of digital media. I've written countless amounts of HTML, hosted servers, and ran so many of my own websites over the years.
I don't remember my first video. It's gone forever now, in the abyss of the internet where nothing is really gone forever... And yet, it is.
My original Youtube channel was started in the beginning of what we now recognize as modern internet era. Youtube was in the midst of its third year when I decided to stop watching and start creating. I talked to Youtubers all the time, back before they became who they are today. Ray William Johnson talked to me through messages and comments quite often, and he gave me permission to "remix" his "hit" song Doin' Your Mom. My god it was awful. I'm pretty sure I just ripped his music video from youtube, threw it into Windows Movie Maker, and put another song underneath of it. What the hell did I know? I was like 12. Literally. Anyways, he's coming up on ten million subscribers now. I used to talk to MillyMollyMandy16 who has something like 20k subscribers now. Meanwhile, circa 2008, I had 119 subs and thousands of video views.
Within a year I had over 100 videos uploaded. Thats like 2 a week. I remember making those videos with my friends every single day when we went home from school. It was what we loved to do. I've gotta give a shoutout here to Liz Ring (Capparra, now), Monica Morrisey, and Makayla Aracara. They were my stars.
I remember one time when Liz was staying the night at my house, I had a Christmas wreath hanging outside of my bedroom window. It was late, the lights were out, and we had probably just finished watching a scary movie. Next thing I know Liz is screaming. She scares me half to death and when I ask her what's wrong, she says there's someone staring in the window. So I creep over, slowly, and it looks like there's an outline of a hood... like, an eskimo hood on a winter coat. Nervously we lift up the curtain and -- oh yeah. Christmas wreath. We spent the rest of the night making a 5 minute skit about murderous eskimos and it was probably uploaded by the next morning.
Makayla and I used to skip school. We would stay home and play gamecube, or we would make our own music videos for our favorite songs. One day we made a stop motion video for The Used's "Paralyzed" Get it? Paralyzed? Stop Motion? Hahaha. Man that was a good one. The official music video was also stop motion, and we basically just copied it, but in my house. It took all day to take all of those pictures and edit them together juuuust right. I remember one part of the video I did stop motion of a caterpillar that was in the driveway, and had to wait around outside until I could find a butterfly to photograph, too.
Monica used to just shoot the shit with me. We would screen share ourselves on Chatroulette and Omegle, or just do random vlogs. We loved to do weird stuff on random websites and that actually ended up leading to some friendships. We met Matt Earle on a streaming site where he just went online and played guitar. And we met Ty McAllister on chatroulette, when he told us to put mentos in our diet coke. Nothing happened, because our soda was already flat. So we just drank minty coke and thought that was all that was supposed to happen. Sometimes we would attempt to make our own music, and chronicle our adventures around town.
RainWaterProductions was fun. It was garbage, but it was fun. And then Jessi Slaughter's Dad Called the Cyber Police on me and like that, everything was gone. I had spent the better part of three years uploading so much copyrighted content and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Sure, half of my videos were original content, but the other half was music videos that we made ourselves (using copyrighted music) or movies that I had ripped off the DVD and uploaded for other people to watch (listen I didn't realize how illegal that was okay). And without warning, my entire channel was deleted.
I had just upgraded to a MacBook Pro and didn't even have my old laptop anymore. The 100+ videos I had made the last three years were gone. I tried contacting Youtube, but they said that there was just so much illegal content on my channel that they had skipped giving me three warnings and just deleted it all entirely. I wanted my channel back - my subscribers, my views, my videos. I conceded to deleting anything that wasn't allowed, so long as I could get my original content back. But, there was nothing they could do. Youtube said they had no way of retrieving it and that I was out of luck.
So, I started a new channel. I decided to make it more professional. I started Darrian Dowdy Productions the summer after my Freshman year of highschool and I made sure to do it right this time. I only use royalty free music in my videos and now I stick to serious work, like documentary and freelance. The skits are few and far between but I hope to make more soon. Now, Youtube runs a little differently. You can have copyrighted music for the most part, but, you get a copyright claim filed against you. All this means is that as long as the owner of the content is cool with it, your video can stay up, and it is monetized for the content owner.
Youtube is a whole different game now. Being a Youtuber can even be a career. But that means that the people with millions and millions of subscribers are going to get way more attention than you are.
My Youtube is for personal use and I generally don't make much money, unless my videos lead to freelance work. I have a whopping 22 subscribers (where are my 140 Facebook followers at?!) and about 14,000 views, for a total of over 700 hours.
Ten years of work have boiled down to just about 75 videos currently on my Youtube channel. You can view them here.
Thank you guys so much for ten years of believing in me. If I hadn't started making these videos in 2008, maybe I wouldn't have taken all of those production classes with Chris Panfil in highschool.
Maybe that wouldn't have lead me to going to college for Media Production at Buffalo State. Maybe I wouldn't have graduated as the top student in my major.
Here's to ten more years of having fun and making memories.
If you want to see what my Youtube channel looked like ten years ago, its available on the Wayback Machine.
