Hi, I'm Gabe. Currently a senior attending Moses Brown School in Providence, RI. I started my filmmaking journey when I was 8. I'm am the indoor and outdoor Track and Field captain, and work on the tech side of the fall theatre productions we put on each year. So here's my story:
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General Background and YouTube Journey
My interest in filmmaking also started to develop around the same time I got my first skateboard. YouTube videos peaked my interest initially, with channels like "Braile" who looked like they were just having a great time made 8 year old me beg my parents for months until I got my first skateboard.
I continued to watch those channels that had initially gotten me into skateboarding, learning from their trick tutorials, and practicing the steps they laid out in my driveway. After I got an iPod, I started using the video functions, filming my own practice to analyze my technique and to track progress. Eventually I started combining different videos that I took, putting them together into a highlight reel of sorts using iMovie. As my skateboarding progressed, so did my filmmaking. Constantly experimenting w/ different angles, different editing styles, and slowly adding in sound design allowed for my video creation to branch out into other areas of my life.
With these skills developing, I started taking other videos of things I was doing, editing them into a final product to share with my family and friends. At the time, all I wanted to do was be a YouTuber like the people I religiously watched, but my parents worried that it wasn't safe and didn't allow it.
Fast forward five years, I was still regularly making videos and my skateboarding had progressed significantly. One day I just realized that these two hobbies, that had worked hand in hand for so many years, could come together for other people to enjoy.
Birth of a YouTube Channel
When the pandemic hit, I took advantage of the freed up time and got to work on my own skateboarding YouTube channel, finally combining the two things I loved most! With the research I had done years before, I knew exactly how to start. I committed myself to an upload schedule, waking up early, doing all my school work that was posted for remote learning, and would finish by about late morning/early afternoon. That's when my real work would begin. The rest of the day was spent coming up with video ideas, filming them, and then editing them for the rest of the evening. For months, I spent every single day working diligently to create and put out new videos. If I wasn’t posting that day, I was planning for the next!
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Growth
While I was working extremely hard, there was unfortunately little to no traction from viewers. For context being the start of the pandemic, TikTok was on the rise. Unlike YouTube, the shorter video form (less than a minute), and access to a larger audience all stuck at home and spending more and more time on the app, gave me an idea. Because of its format being quick and unfiltered, I realized that if I could get people's attention, just for a few seconds, I could market myself and my channel to build an audience. Taking highlights from my YouTube videos and compiling them, I created short promotional videos for my content and uploaded them to TikTok. While it didn't work right away, I stuck with it. After enough trial and error and experimentation, I learned how to not only create these short videos in an appealing way, but to capture someone's attention, and effectively pitch them on my channel. All done to encourage to check out some of my videos within a span of 20-35 seconds. As I posted more of these TikToks, I started to see traction build. After months of hard work to put together quality videos, the viewers started to rise! On YouTube, it went from 5 people subscribed to 100, then soon 1,000! And I didn't stop. All of a sudden 5000 people were watching, and then all the way up to a little under 12,000!! YouTube wasn’t the only thing skyrocketing, on TikTok my following grew from nothing, to a little over 32,000 followers. Over the course of this process I received a little over 307,000 likes across my videos!
Take Aways​
The most important thing I got from any of this wasn’t the subscribers, or views, or even the likes. What I really got out of this process was the development of my filmmaking skills that extended far past just putting something together, but truly creating a compelling story that resonated with an audience. What I got through YouTube and other social medias like TikTok was the invaluable skill of connecting with an audience through filmmaking. This continues to carry over into many of my current projects and I hope to continue to develop these skills at higher and higher levels!
