I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in the nutshell, he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos, and when his friends asked him why he hadn't uploaded them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first; otherwise, they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited.
The same is with me, and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people's videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media. I am simply not impressed with many of them because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explaining nothing about where you were, why you were taking that photo, or without saying a little something about the place itself. With videos, it goes even further—filming a YouTube video of your children playing on the beach is great, but this is your memory only and meaningful only to you and your dearest. In my case, in order to watch such a video to the end, I would need something more, like at least a small, interesting narrative during the clip or a hint of the plot behind your little film.
With all that in mind, when Viktor wanted to start his own YouTube channel, we both agreed that uploading simple video files taken out of memory cards would be lame and lazy. We didn't actually talk about it or define any rules, but I think he understood the creativity of the entire process and the channel properly. Simply put, the uploaded video must be accompanied with the story, filmed with at least several shots, and edited. Anyhow, these days are actually sort of the anniversary—the entire full year of his channel. He named it simple: zViktor22, and with every new video file, I am proud of him more and more. The future of the channel is surely unknown, but the experience gathered, even in this past single year, is priceless. I am helping a lot, with all the technicality, the best I can, but he deserves the most of the credits. For the occasion, I decided to include in this post the most of our efforts from the passing year grouped within these playlists.
For the first playlist, let's start with the usual for the fifth graders. Sports, games, and various plays. It started with filming Minecraft and other games either within console and smartphone, but in recent months we made more complex videos, starting with Lego, summer plays in backyards, and, like the latest two video clips, biking and slow-motion scenes with our latest purchase, GoPro Hero 5 Black, which is ideal for YouTube publishing. I am sure there will be more and more 'proofs of concepts' kinds of videos to demonstrate what GoPro really can do, as well as more videos that we will be storing in this playlist.
Science and education are always fun to deal with. This is the realm where ideas come by themselves, and I am really looking forward to future clips in this regard. I am encouraging you to watch at least the first couple of videos from this playlist; we are especially proud of "Birth of Sasha", which is the video filmed during the entire month with us monitoring the nest of city doves just a couple of meters from the window in our front yard. Also, we filmed the history and artifacts from the two nearest museums we visited this summer along the short biking trip, and last but not least, the great clip called "Black Snake", which was a great success in Viktor's school last spring.
Vlogs, or 'video logs' is certainly the latest contribution from the mighty YouTube. Just like weblogs or blogs, this is rising online activity in both quantity and quality every year. We tried to sort videos out and choose those that resemble video logging, but to be honest, only the 'Crete' video belongs to this playlist fully. The idea was to film everything during our summer vacation on the island of Crete this year and, at the end, create a nice travel guide type of video. From the beginning, this was Viktor's idea and effort, and it was difficult to make a short film out of everything we filmed. At the end, we made a proper travel guide, and it was actually, to date, the most visited video from the zViktor22 channel. Statistics show that this one is watched not only to the usual streaming and feeds, but also lots of views come from smart TVs as well. I am sure popularity of Crete island is what is driving people to our video, but still, seeing big numbers in stat area is what everyone is looking for.
DIY is perhaps the oldest feed and playlist Viktor is playing with and often with his friends from the school. It combines great efforts, skills, science research, and tons of fun. I already wrote about these videos previously on the blog, and to better understand how we made them, please continue to the Do It Yourself post from earlier this year. There are similar videos on YouTube, but we always try to add something new to our experiments, and in a couple of them we succeeded just fine.
'Short films' playlist is the hardest to make. It's one thing to make a moderate YouTube video, but to create a real movie is completely another. Game of Life was our only effort in this direction. We filmed the entire summer last year, and it required more than a month to edit, and it has everything that ordinary movies have—the script, dialogues, decent storytelling—in a word, it was the best play we've ever done so far. Later, I used snapshots from the video to create a very nice comic book. To download it and to read more about the process, please proceed to Game of Life - the Graphic Novel.
Finally, 'Challenges' is the most interesting playlist for Viktor's friends and himself, as all video clips from this group they made almost entirely by themselves. They created and filmed all challenges on their own, and it was great monitoring the entire process of creation. Amazing time when you are in their age—the second part of elementary school or junior high is the most entertaining period of childhood, and I am glad they are documenting it as it goes. Seeing all this from the future perspective would be something extraordinary.
For the very end, the playlist that started all. 'Cooking' feed contains several videos that originated even more in time from Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel. The first video from this playlist dates back to the summer of the year 2015. There are more older videos with Viktor being the host and presenting our both culinary skills, so to speak, and along with the videos in this playlist, also exists a MPJ thread called 'Food & Cooking' with recipes and stories behind both filming and the dishes we prepared.
YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ
The same is with me, and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people's videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media. I am simply not impressed with many of them because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explaining nothing about where you were, why you were taking that photo, or without saying a little something about the place itself. With videos, it goes even further—filming a YouTube video of your children playing on the beach is great, but this is your memory only and meaningful only to you and your dearest. In my case, in order to watch such a video to the end, I would need something more, like at least a small, interesting narrative during the clip or a hint of the plot behind your little film.
With all that in mind, when Viktor wanted to start his own YouTube channel, we both agreed that uploading simple video files taken out of memory cards would be lame and lazy. We didn't actually talk about it or define any rules, but I think he understood the creativity of the entire process and the channel properly. Simply put, the uploaded video must be accompanied with the story, filmed with at least several shots, and edited. Anyhow, these days are actually sort of the anniversary—the entire full year of his channel. He named it simple: zViktor22, and with every new video file, I am proud of him more and more. The future of the channel is surely unknown, but the experience gathered, even in this past single year, is priceless. I am helping a lot, with all the technicality, the best I can, but he deserves the most of the credits. For the occasion, I decided to include in this post the most of our efforts from the passing year grouped within these playlists.
For the first playlist, let's start with the usual for the fifth graders. Sports, games, and various plays. It started with filming Minecraft and other games either within console and smartphone, but in recent months we made more complex videos, starting with Lego, summer plays in backyards, and, like the latest two video clips, biking and slow-motion scenes with our latest purchase, GoPro Hero 5 Black, which is ideal for YouTube publishing. I am sure there will be more and more 'proofs of concepts' kinds of videos to demonstrate what GoPro really can do, as well as more videos that we will be storing in this playlist.
Science and education are always fun to deal with. This is the realm where ideas come by themselves, and I am really looking forward to future clips in this regard. I am encouraging you to watch at least the first couple of videos from this playlist; we are especially proud of "Birth of Sasha", which is the video filmed during the entire month with us monitoring the nest of city doves just a couple of meters from the window in our front yard. Also, we filmed the history and artifacts from the two nearest museums we visited this summer along the short biking trip, and last but not least, the great clip called "Black Snake", which was a great success in Viktor's school last spring.
Vlogs, or 'video logs' is certainly the latest contribution from the mighty YouTube. Just like weblogs or blogs, this is rising online activity in both quantity and quality every year. We tried to sort videos out and choose those that resemble video logging, but to be honest, only the 'Crete' video belongs to this playlist fully. The idea was to film everything during our summer vacation on the island of Crete this year and, at the end, create a nice travel guide type of video. From the beginning, this was Viktor's idea and effort, and it was difficult to make a short film out of everything we filmed. At the end, we made a proper travel guide, and it was actually, to date, the most visited video from the zViktor22 channel. Statistics show that this one is watched not only to the usual streaming and feeds, but also lots of views come from smart TVs as well. I am sure popularity of Crete island is what is driving people to our video, but still, seeing big numbers in stat area is what everyone is looking for.
DIY is perhaps the oldest feed and playlist Viktor is playing with and often with his friends from the school. It combines great efforts, skills, science research, and tons of fun. I already wrote about these videos previously on the blog, and to better understand how we made them, please continue to the Do It Yourself post from earlier this year. There are similar videos on YouTube, but we always try to add something new to our experiments, and in a couple of them we succeeded just fine.
'Short films' playlist is the hardest to make. It's one thing to make a moderate YouTube video, but to create a real movie is completely another. Game of Life was our only effort in this direction. We filmed the entire summer last year, and it required more than a month to edit, and it has everything that ordinary movies have—the script, dialogues, decent storytelling—in a word, it was the best play we've ever done so far. Later, I used snapshots from the video to create a very nice comic book. To download it and to read more about the process, please proceed to Game of Life - the Graphic Novel.
Finally, 'Challenges' is the most interesting playlist for Viktor's friends and himself, as all video clips from this group they made almost entirely by themselves. They created and filmed all challenges on their own, and it was great monitoring the entire process of creation. Amazing time when you are in their age—the second part of elementary school or junior high is the most entertaining period of childhood, and I am glad they are documenting it as it goes. Seeing all this from the future perspective would be something extraordinary.
For the very end, the playlist that started all. 'Cooking' feed contains several videos that originated even more in time from Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel. The first video from this playlist dates back to the summer of the year 2015. There are more older videos with Viktor being the host and presenting our both culinary skills, so to speak, and along with the videos in this playlist, also exists a MPJ thread called 'Food & Cooking' with recipes and stories behind both filming and the dishes we prepared.
YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ