Hi, I'm Gabe. I am currently a sophomore at Ithaca College studying film. I graduated from Moses Brown School in Providence, RI. I started my filmmaking journey when I was 8.
So here's my story:
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General Background and YouTube Journey
My interest in filmmaking started to develop around the same time I got my first skateboard. It was YouTube videos themselves that initially peaked my interest in skateboarding. Channels like "Braile" showed a bunch of friends just having a great time skating. This made my 8-year-old self beg for months until my parents let me get my first skateboard.
I continued to watch those channels that had initially gotten me into skateboarding, learning from their trick tutorials, and practicing each step meticulously 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 music 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 to be putting yourself out onto the internet 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. It suddenly clicked that I could combine 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 remote school work, so that I was done by about late morning/early afternoon. That's when the real work would begin. The rest of the day was spent coming up with video ideas, filming, and then editing 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 on any given day, I was getting the newest video ready for upload!
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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 of 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 in order to drive traffic to my YouTube. 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 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 putting together videos, the viewers started to rise! On YouTube, it went from 5 people subscribed to 100, then soon 1,000! And it 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 though. On TikTok my following grew from nothing, to a little over 32,000 followers and 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 and learning how to market myself. 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!
