Exploratory Endeavors #1: Youtube Vlog

This summer, I redid my entire website, coming up with new goals, designs, and code. As part of the overhaul, I had to come up with a new "tagline", or the text that's displayed in the hero section. As part of that, I decided to describe myself as "someone who was addicted to learning". I think that's appropriate. I love to try new things and learn more about how many different things are made. I haven't really been documenting them, but I think that documenting what I've learned and felt could also be really valuable. So, this is the first post in a series (hopefully lol) called Exploratory Endeavors.

For the grand first entry in this series, I gotta cover one of the largest endeavors I've ever undertaken. To create a youtube vlog! Not just any youtube vlog, but a video in the style of @Yuuki_Japan, as an homage to him. Now, it's been a few months since I did this, but back then he was still on hiatus, and I wanted to make this to send to him (he has since returned! hooray!).

I did have a little background in youtube and video editing already. I've done a few video editing projects for school, and I've also made a "trailer" for a minecraft event server I did over winter break last year. So I was already knew how to use Davinci Resolve. Now, I also have more specific background on making youtube videos, but that's a story for another day and maybe a story that's better left buried, haha.

My primary goal was to recreate a full vlog in Yuuki's style, with as much quality as I could muster. Since Yuuki's videos are characterized by a simple, no frills style, I hoped that I would be up to the task. First, was the analysis step. I picked a fairly short and straightforward vlog of Yuuki visiting a restaurant, since I knew that was the type of video I was going to be recreating. Here, I was looking to learn more about how he divided his video into sections, how long each section was, how much information was in each section, how many/quick his cuts were, how and when music/voiceover/live voice was used, what visual overlays/effects were used, and how he described the taste of the food. I looked for and wished there was some kind of "video annotating" app, but I couldn't find anything good (app idea?). So I ended up doing it Davinci Resolve, just adding extra video tracks and stretching random images to mark different sections. I also downloaded a transcript of the entire video, and wrote comments on each section, to help break it down the actual content. After all this work, I had a pretty thorough understanding of how Yuuki's videos were structured and organized. Next, I had to make something of my own.

After all this analysis, it was time to make some content. I already knew I was going to make a review of an udon store that was nearby, so I started doing research. In my analysis, had found that Yuuki usually tells us about interesting and relevant facts about where we're going and about the store we are visiting. Since I was in Seattle, I did some (fairly low quality) research about the history of the Japanese population in Seattle and about the store and chef I was visiting. This took longer than I expected! Even with a fairly low bar, it took some time to find something that would be interesting to tell my "viewers".

Step Three! I moved onto the "scripting" phase, or really rather the outlining phase. I created different sections, just like I had seen in Yuuki's video, and wrote out what each part of the video was going to be. Stuff like where I would physically be, whether it would be a voiceover or live audio, what facts/quips I would be saying, stuff like that. Since I was following a preexisting style, this part wasn't too hard.

Now I started the vlogging part of the vlog. I got out of work, went to the Spheres where I had planned to start the video, aaaaaaaand struggled to build the courage to start filming myself in public. You see, I'm not really built for this. I'm not the type to just start doing things in public with no care for what everyone else thinks. Now, I knew that noone would really care - after all, youtubers come to the spheres all the time - and I was going to be talking in Korean, so basically nobody would be able to understand me anyway. Buuuut - difficult it was anyway. I think I loitered around for like 40 minutes before I was able to muster the courage to get my phone out and start recording. yikes lol. And even after I had started, if I started walking towards people while trying to record the short opening section, I impulsively stopped recording and had to start over lol. Eventually, I got the clip I needed, and moved on to recording the other parts. Recording myself getting on the bus was a little awkward - I don't want to come off creepy right. Like, I knew I would be blurring them all out later, but they don't know that. Recording POV walking into the small restaurant was embarrassing too for the same reason. Getting to my table and being able to just point the camera at myself and not talk (restaurant section is voice over'd like in many Yuuki videos). But when the food arrived, I ran into a new challenge. In Yuuki's videos, he doesn't show his face, just up to his neck. I need to replicate this, but when I bend down a little to actually eat the udon, the bottom part of my face would come in frame! (along with my mouth kek). Of course, I could (and did) crop in post, but I was fiddling with the camera angle for quite a while. At least the restaurant was quiet, so I got good audio. After recording my conclusion, the difficult vlogging section was finally over - would not recommend for any introverts. I related deeply to whenever Yuuki would say he was going to do live audio but decided to voiceover instead when he saw how crowded a place was.

The next part could be done in the safety of my own apartment. Voiceover time! The voiceover contained a lot more factual information like the history and taste review, so recording this was a bit harder than I had expected. Unlike the live sections where I could just casually discuss where I was or where I was going, I wanted to have high-quality delivery of things like information about the chinese exclusion act or how smooth the udon broth was. From a previous exploratory endeavor (which I will write about later perhaps) I knew that the echo in my apartment was pretty bad. So, I opted to record everything on my bed under my blankets. This resulted in drastically increased audio quality, but it started getting hot, cramped, and eventually my laptop turned on the fans and interrupted the recording. I was glad to be done with it.

It was finally time to edit. But before I could edit, I needed to gather all the assets. I scoured the internet for the exact fonts Yuuki used, public domain images to use, and free songs that were similar in vibes to the background music that Yuuki used. Editing the video itself went pretty smoothly, and I hit my video length target. But there was another beast I had never expected coming. That beast's name was subtitles.

In anime piracy circles (not that I would know anything about it of course, fbi), there's something called a fansub. Often, a show releases only in Japanese without any official translations of any kind. The role of the fan subber, is to translate everything in the show, dialogue, on screen text, etc, and subtitle it on screen. Since these subtitles are baked into the video, they can be quite fancy, having custom fonts, colors, locations, sizes, and even animations. Many times, this work is done on a volunteer basis for completely free. After experiencing subtitling this short couple minute youtube video, I have ceased to be able to understand how these people subtitle videos fore free in their spare time. And fansubbed episodes get uploaded to various sites just a few hours after the episodes air officially! Subtitling requires me to take an accurate transcription of the video, break it up into reasonable chunks that fit on screen, time it to the audio, and place and style all of them. It is so much work, and it is so so boring. Since I wanted to make my video intelligible to my non-korean speaking friends, I had to make both the korean subs that are baked into the video (as per Yuuki's style), and also the soft subs in english to be overlaid in youtube. Complete with positioning, color coding, and translating, this process took absolutely forever. The hard subs were done directly in Davinci, and the english subs were timed in davinci and styled in Aeigis sub. I tried to do the whole thing in Aeigis, but the UI in davinci was so much more intuitive for me. I never want to touch subtitles again in my life.

Finally, everything was complete. From the start of planning to the day I uploaded, it had been just about a month. A month of working on this project after work, whenever I had the time and energy for it, that is. Now I truly understand why Yuuki's, (and other youtubers') videos take so long to come out. If you have a primary job, doing this takes an eternity and a half! But I was able to render, upload, and finally publish my video for all to see. All of my scripting, video shooting, editing, and subtitling was done and complete. What an excursion, an endeavor if you will, this has been. Le fin.

Much later, I sent an email to Yuuki just to express my gratitude for his videos and show him my little fan video. He watched my video and commented, which made my day. Thanks Yuuki.