Idec Sdawkminn
Horror Versions
I can do detailed.
I guess I started out as a kid, late elementary school and middle school. I had an NES and one thing I liked doing was running the A/V cables through the VCR and taping myself playing games on VHS cassettes. No one ever wanted to watch them except me.
I've always been one to show people things. Always wanting to get reactions out of people. In high school I would take large pads of paper and draw stick figure flip-books, both sides so you could turn it over and continue the story, and some of them spanned 4 pads of paper this way. I'd show them to my friends and anyone who wanted to see them. I wasn't popular in school, so this was a cool way I could get some attention. I was also raised in a pretty seriously Christian home (pray when you get sick and don't go to doctors) and was known as a goodie-goodie, so that probably didn't help.
In mid 2006 I created my YouTube channel (under the name of Idec Sdawkminn) as a place to host videos so I could show them to people. "Look at this cool video! Here, I'll post it on YouTube so you can see it." Random clips of things here and there. A funny scene from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode I had just watched. Showing off my method of defeating Emerald Weapon from Final Fantasy VII, which is faster and more elegant than any other method I've seen. Stuff like that. I never paid attention to my number of views or subscribers. When I'd get notifications of people subscribing, I'd be like, "Why? I hardly ever post things and it's random stuff when I do. Silly people."
Later on in 2013 or thereabouts I got into the modding part of a 1997 RTS game called Total Annihilation. I got really into the programming part of it and found that I seemed to be better at it than most other people making the mods. I created a thread on TAUniverse.com and started making my own little mods and posting video demonstrations of them in my thread. It was easier than having to download the file and importing it into your game each time. Most people wouldn't do that and I wanted to make it as convenient as I could for people to be able to marvel at my creations. I made many things and uploaded and posted many videos about them. I got the other top modders wanting my help on things that had been a problem in their mods for months or even years. They were saying that maybe I could finally fix it. I don't think there was anything I wasn't able to find a satisfactory solution to within a few days at most.
In 2014 I first discovered PewDiePie when I was looking up people playing some of my favorite games growing up. I think one of my searches led me to Cat Mario and PewDiePie was playing it. That was my first time even thinking about doing YouTube for its own sake and not just as a place to host videos to link to on other sites. Also, it was difficult for me to find good quality videos of people playing some of my favorite games as well as I did. Ranger-X for Sega Genesis was a great example. So I decided if those guys could do it, I certainly could. I made a "Let's Play" of Ranger-X, then Dragon Ball Z: Legends for the PS1, and got halfway through a playthrough of Prototype for the PC. I discovered that it was difficult to find time to record myself playing and trying to find things to say when I have a wife and 2 kids and the only time I get time to be alone is when they are asleep and I have to be quiet. Or it required me to close myself off from them and none of us liked that. So I stopped doing that.
Around October of 2014 discovered a channel called Oleg Berg that takes songs and edits the notes to change it from major key to minor key and vice versa. I love stuff like that and I went searching for more. This led me to some songs "in g-major" and they looked and sounded weird. They had nothing to do with "g major" musically. It was just kind of an ironic name given to the set of edits. I watched several of these, my favorite one being Frozen's "Let It Go in Demonic G-Major". This one was different from the other ones in that it only had low notes, none of the weird-sounding high ones, and had the snow colored red instead of being just inverted colors/photo negative. I was intrigued and wanted to try my hand at it. Most of them were bad quality all the way around and I thought I could do better.
I looked up how to make them and found varying tutorials and not much consistency. A little frustrated, I found a forum where someone was asking what made the "g-major" videos sound creepy, and learned about the concept of musical dissonance and that the edits to the audio inadvertently added dissonance to the sound. I read more about it, downloaded an audio editor, then experimented with different combinations of sounds until I found one that maximized the dissonance to my ears while keeping the overall sound as clean and clear as possible. I also spoke with my musician co-worker and he helped me with things like eliminating clipping. I did the same attention to quality and detail to the video portion of it, trying to find the best edits to look the creepiest which still included the inverted colors look. I made my own "Let It Go" one, as well as some Barney the Dinosaur ones and some others. I really liked the effect. I still referred to them as "G-Major" at the time. They were pretty few and far between and I was still mainly uploading Total Annihilation mod videos.
At the end of January 2015 I noticed that my non-HD videos, which included my "G-Major" ones, had lost a lot of quality and were now in 240p, but my HD ones retained their quality. I redid my "Let It Go" one in HD and deleted the old one. It was a shame because my old one had around 65,000 views by that time. I still had less than 100 subscribers, but I never paid attention to them, so I don't remember exactly how many I had. By the end of March my HD "Let It Go" one had 54,000 views. Then something very unexpected happened. Starting April 9 the views on it skyrocketed and by April 18 it had 1 million views and I had reached 1,000 subscribers. That was also the date I first considered that I could be making money off this and I enabled monetization. I made $38 that first day. Turns out my video had gotten suggested next to a really popular video from a popular channel. The views died down shortly after when the algorithm stopped suggesting mine on that video, but I still consistently got about 40,000 views overall per day. I made $1,000 in May. I decided to make more of these videos and make it a regular thing. I renamed them from "G Major" to "Horror Version". I didn't want mine to be confused with all those other ones. Later on I also changed my channel name to "Horror Versions" and made another channel called Idec Sdawkminn and re-uploaded my non-horror-version videos on that one.
I've changed up the edits over time and upload daily now. I've always made a new "Let It Go" video with my newest edit style to sort of show it off. I also change my thumbnail design for each type to differentiate them. The video in my signature is my 3rd version of my "Let It Go" video, which includes my most recent edit style (well, 5th version if you include the 1st non-HD one and also my German-language version).
As far as how it helps me, the money is nice to pay off my credit card and supplement my day job. Besides that, it's nice to get regular comments and reactions to my videos, and be able to have a semi-unusual thing to tell people about when it comes up in conversation. Everyone wants to know how the "making money on YouTube" thing works.
I guess I started out as a kid, late elementary school and middle school. I had an NES and one thing I liked doing was running the A/V cables through the VCR and taping myself playing games on VHS cassettes. No one ever wanted to watch them except me.
I've always been one to show people things. Always wanting to get reactions out of people. In high school I would take large pads of paper and draw stick figure flip-books, both sides so you could turn it over and continue the story, and some of them spanned 4 pads of paper this way. I'd show them to my friends and anyone who wanted to see them. I wasn't popular in school, so this was a cool way I could get some attention. I was also raised in a pretty seriously Christian home (pray when you get sick and don't go to doctors) and was known as a goodie-goodie, so that probably didn't help.
In mid 2006 I created my YouTube channel (under the name of Idec Sdawkminn) as a place to host videos so I could show them to people. "Look at this cool video! Here, I'll post it on YouTube so you can see it." Random clips of things here and there. A funny scene from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode I had just watched. Showing off my method of defeating Emerald Weapon from Final Fantasy VII, which is faster and more elegant than any other method I've seen. Stuff like that. I never paid attention to my number of views or subscribers. When I'd get notifications of people subscribing, I'd be like, "Why? I hardly ever post things and it's random stuff when I do. Silly people."
Later on in 2013 or thereabouts I got into the modding part of a 1997 RTS game called Total Annihilation. I got really into the programming part of it and found that I seemed to be better at it than most other people making the mods. I created a thread on TAUniverse.com and started making my own little mods and posting video demonstrations of them in my thread. It was easier than having to download the file and importing it into your game each time. Most people wouldn't do that and I wanted to make it as convenient as I could for people to be able to marvel at my creations. I made many things and uploaded and posted many videos about them. I got the other top modders wanting my help on things that had been a problem in their mods for months or even years. They were saying that maybe I could finally fix it. I don't think there was anything I wasn't able to find a satisfactory solution to within a few days at most.
In 2014 I first discovered PewDiePie when I was looking up people playing some of my favorite games growing up. I think one of my searches led me to Cat Mario and PewDiePie was playing it. That was my first time even thinking about doing YouTube for its own sake and not just as a place to host videos to link to on other sites. Also, it was difficult for me to find good quality videos of people playing some of my favorite games as well as I did. Ranger-X for Sega Genesis was a great example. So I decided if those guys could do it, I certainly could. I made a "Let's Play" of Ranger-X, then Dragon Ball Z: Legends for the PS1, and got halfway through a playthrough of Prototype for the PC. I discovered that it was difficult to find time to record myself playing and trying to find things to say when I have a wife and 2 kids and the only time I get time to be alone is when they are asleep and I have to be quiet. Or it required me to close myself off from them and none of us liked that. So I stopped doing that.
Around October of 2014 discovered a channel called Oleg Berg that takes songs and edits the notes to change it from major key to minor key and vice versa. I love stuff like that and I went searching for more. This led me to some songs "in g-major" and they looked and sounded weird. They had nothing to do with "g major" musically. It was just kind of an ironic name given to the set of edits. I watched several of these, my favorite one being Frozen's "Let It Go in Demonic G-Major". This one was different from the other ones in that it only had low notes, none of the weird-sounding high ones, and had the snow colored red instead of being just inverted colors/photo negative. I was intrigued and wanted to try my hand at it. Most of them were bad quality all the way around and I thought I could do better.
I looked up how to make them and found varying tutorials and not much consistency. A little frustrated, I found a forum where someone was asking what made the "g-major" videos sound creepy, and learned about the concept of musical dissonance and that the edits to the audio inadvertently added dissonance to the sound. I read more about it, downloaded an audio editor, then experimented with different combinations of sounds until I found one that maximized the dissonance to my ears while keeping the overall sound as clean and clear as possible. I also spoke with my musician co-worker and he helped me with things like eliminating clipping. I did the same attention to quality and detail to the video portion of it, trying to find the best edits to look the creepiest which still included the inverted colors look. I made my own "Let It Go" one, as well as some Barney the Dinosaur ones and some others. I really liked the effect. I still referred to them as "G-Major" at the time. They were pretty few and far between and I was still mainly uploading Total Annihilation mod videos.
At the end of January 2015 I noticed that my non-HD videos, which included my "G-Major" ones, had lost a lot of quality and were now in 240p, but my HD ones retained their quality. I redid my "Let It Go" one in HD and deleted the old one. It was a shame because my old one had around 65,000 views by that time. I still had less than 100 subscribers, but I never paid attention to them, so I don't remember exactly how many I had. By the end of March my HD "Let It Go" one had 54,000 views. Then something very unexpected happened. Starting April 9 the views on it skyrocketed and by April 18 it had 1 million views and I had reached 1,000 subscribers. That was also the date I first considered that I could be making money off this and I enabled monetization. I made $38 that first day. Turns out my video had gotten suggested next to a really popular video from a popular channel. The views died down shortly after when the algorithm stopped suggesting mine on that video, but I still consistently got about 40,000 views overall per day. I made $1,000 in May. I decided to make more of these videos and make it a regular thing. I renamed them from "G Major" to "Horror Version". I didn't want mine to be confused with all those other ones. Later on I also changed my channel name to "Horror Versions" and made another channel called Idec Sdawkminn and re-uploaded my non-horror-version videos on that one.
I've changed up the edits over time and upload daily now. I've always made a new "Let It Go" video with my newest edit style to sort of show it off. I also change my thumbnail design for each type to differentiate them. The video in my signature is my 3rd version of my "Let It Go" video, which includes my most recent edit style (well, 5th version if you include the 1st non-HD one and also my German-language version).
As far as how it helps me, the money is nice to pay off my credit card and supplement my day job. Besides that, it's nice to get regular comments and reactions to my videos, and be able to have a semi-unusual thing to tell people about when it comes up in conversation. Everyone wants to know how the "making money on YouTube" thing works.
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