Like many millennials who grew up in the 2000’s I developed a fascination with Youtube as a platform for independent creators. Particularly I grew to love the video essay format as a place to hear nerds like me talk about our passions like movies, music, and books. I also appreciated how said video essayists avoided (for the most part) manically yelling into the camera without actually reviewing anything that tended to be very popular in the early days of Youtube.
One such Youtuber that I discovered in more recent history but has been around for several years is Austin McConnel. A film maker from Missouri who just kind of makes video’s about whatever is currently interesting him. His earliest videos were trailers for a feature length film he had made but soon he was making videos about theatrical productions, books he liked, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The views for these videos fluctuated wildly sometimes getting upwards of 5 million and sometimes “only” getting around 100 thousand views. His channel really took off about four years into its creation when he made a four minute video entitled “What To Do If Your Parachute Fails” an absurdist piece played more for comedy than anything, which garnered somewhere around 22 million views. Now most creators would choose to follow that up with more videos in kind, do what works (and in all fairness he did make a sequel of sorts a couple years later), however Austin instead chose to go on doing his own thing and making a lot of videos I really loved. Some highlights include his ongoing weird history and useless information series, the 47 minutes “Voicemails From Strangers” (which low key may make you want to cry) and more personal stories like the one about the time Hollywood called him or his own retrospection on his failure as a film maker. These down to earth videos about a fairly average dude from the Midwest just making videos about stuff he loves really struck a chord with me. It’s not too often you see people maintain their artistic integrity and still remain relatively popular (though admittedly his videos have been less popular in recent history, rarely surpassing the 1 million views mark). His most recent video series that I really love is taking superhero properties that have fallen into the public domain and using them to create his own shared universe. So far he has written a novel (Spider-Woman), helped produced a Saturday morning style cartoon episode (Cat-Man) and as of this writing is in the process of producing a feature length animated film (Atlas). Once again I just really appreciate this guys taking an idea and running with it despite the fact that it hasn’t brought him nowhere near the numbers of some of his older videos. All this to say I really appreciate and enjoy independent creators and I hope you do to. Go out there and find someone you love and support them.
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