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I had an intro joke planned but I don't need it anymore.
So welcome to the last video of the year
and I gotta say 2019 was a year in which I was very inspired
to improve my craft in many different areas.
I got into music, I upgraded my camera setup, my studio,
and that was in no small part due to inspiration
I received from other YouTubers that I follow
and in some cases know in person.
So what I'm gonna do with this video is round the year off
by sharing 10 of the YouTubers who really inspired me
and pushed me to grow in many areas this year
and I would highly recommend checking out
each and every single one of these people.
And I'll have them linked all in the description down below.
So the first person on my list is somebody
who I would be very surprised
if you haven't seen on YouTube before.
He is my very good friend Matt D'Avella.
I believe Matt and I met in 2018 when I went on his podcast
to talk about general productivity.
But this year I flew back out to LA
and I did an interview with him
that was all about his production process.
And in general how he stays productive.
And after I created that video,
I got really inspired to improve my own production process
and make some improvements in the gear that I was using.
I was kind of using a lot of the same gear
that I've been using for several years,
kind of using static shots not really pushing myself
in terms of filmmaking.
And I gotta say Matt more than anybody else inspired me
in both the way that he makes his own content
but also through talking to me about how he does it
to improve my own process as well.
Now I'm kind of cheating with the second person on my list
because they aren't really a full fledged YouTuber.
They're actually a full time musician,
but I gotta give a shout out to to Tash Sultana.
If you haven't heard Tash Sultana,
they are a live looping artists from Australia
who really kind of blew up last year
and blew up even more this year.
And my head writer Ransom actually introduced me to them
in June and literally everything that I did this year
with music which if you look at my Instagram is quite a lot
in comparison to previous years was really inspired by Tash.
When I learned about live looping,
when I learned that I could mix multiple instruments
together in a live setting.
But also when I just got inspiration from the way they use
multiple instruments and a looper pedal
to create just these amazing songs.
It really got me back into music
and it made me take it a lot more seriously.
Alright, number three on the list is Linus Sebastian
and in fact the entire team over at Linus Media Group.
And I'm gonna tell you something
that I haven't talked about yet before.
But earlier this year, my editor Tony and I
flew up to Vancouver and spent an entire day with Linus.
He was kind enough to let us kind of come into the studio
see exactly how they make all their videos.
And that video is coming in January of next year.
So I'm really excited to share all that with you guys.
But just like with Matt going
and spending a day with the Linus Media Group team,
seeing how they do things in a very detailed way
inspired us to make big improvements in our own process.
So one tip that I would give you is if you wanna improve
your own process and whatever kind of work you're doing,
go and watch how other people that you look up to do it
because you are undoubtedly going to learn techniques
and workflow hacks that you hadn't thought up before
and they're probably gonna improve your own process.
Number four on my list is a guy named Rubidium
who runs a channel called the Crimson Engine.
And this is a bit of a smaller channel but I think more than
any other channel I started watching this year,
the Crimson Engine has helped me to up my game
in terms of production quality.
Now Matt and Linus really, really inspired me
but the Crimson Engine goes through
cinematic lighting setups in detail,
goes through different camera settings that you can use.
How to properly expose, how to shoot in RAW,
how to light a scene dramatically,
how to use things like reflectors like this
or where to place the mic.
And what I love about Rubidium is he's an actual filmmaker.
He's made feature films in the past
and his channel is all about sharing the very, very deep
technical insights and information that he's gained from
doing those bigger budget projects.
Number five on my list is quite a different channel
than the other ones I've mentioned so far
because it's actually a sketch comedy channel.
It's called CalebCity.
And I would be surprised
if you haven't seen this channel as well.
But what really inspired me about CalebCity
was the fact that with very few exceptions,
Caleb does almost everything on his own.
It's just one guy doing all the acting, all the filming,
he plays multiple characters.
And in an earlier video that I made this month,
I talked about how one of the biggest lessons
I sort of learned or really, really relearned this year
was that limitations
are a very beneficial thing to creativity.
When you have very little to work with,
when you have a lot of constraints,
some great stuff can come out of it
because you really have to focus and hone your attention
on what you have to work with.
And to me, CalebCity is one of the best exemplars
of this principle.
Again, he's just one guy making videos
and with very few exceptions,
he doesn't have anybody holding the camera.
He doesn't have anybody really helping him
do these things at all.
And yet his videos are so entertaining
and I almost never find myself clicking out of one
before I've completely finished it.
So go check his channel out.
And if you're looking for some creative inspiration,
I think you're going to get it there.
Number six on my list,
and I think I'm holding up the right number of fingers. Yep.
It's one of the best music educators in my opinion
on the entire YouTube website.
And that is Andrew Wong.
Now I have been watching Andrew's content
for more than a year.
But this year again,
I really started taking music a lot more seriously
than I had in the past.
So I started watching a lot more of Andrew's content.
And what inspires me about Andrew is just how passionate
he is about exploring all aspects of music.
He's into synthesizers.
He's into music production,
he's into playing multiple instruments,
and he loves to share all of what he learns with the world.
And he's also just incredibly prolific.
I mean he releases videos on a pretty consistent schedule.
But in addition to that, if you go over to his Spotify,
you're gonna see that he has created dozens
if not hundreds of songs in just the five years
that he's been on Spotify.
So in addition to his creativity,
in addition to his curiosity,
Andrew's work ethic and his productivity as a musician,
as a full time creative really inspires me
to up my own game as well.
Number seven on the list is Corey Arnold over at 12tone,
which is yet another music channel.
And in this case,
the channel is kind of all about music theory
and music analysis.
But there is one video in particular
that really, really helped me out this year
and got me inspired,
which was this video on how to write lyrics.
And it's kind of funny because if I'm not incorrect,
I remember Corey telling me
or saying somewhere on the internet that
that video wasn't something he had planned on making.
He had this really ambitious video planned
and he wasn't able to get it done when the deadline came,
so instead, he just made this lyric video
and I guess he's not a huge lyricist himself.
So he had said that the video wasn't one of his favorites,
but personally, that video of his has helped me out
more than any other because I had a project this year
which I'm gonna be talking about in the near future
where I went and wrote a song
and I really had very little experience writing lyrics.
So I didn't know how to do it
and I certainly didn't know how to do it competently.
And Corey's video gave me sort of the push that I needed to
sit down and write some lyrics that I was kind of proud of.
And I also have to recommend Nahre Sol's channel.
So Nahre Sol if you haven't heard of her,
she is a classical pianist who is incredibly talented.
If you have ever seen one of her videos
where she actually performs some of the music she's written,
it's kind of mind blowing to be honest.
But this year, I started to play piano
again, started taking music a bit more seriously.
So Nahre Sol's channel was one that I started watching
because of that.
And she's really inspiring to me
for a couple of different reasons.
First, she has this video that kind of goes through
a realistic practice session of a professional pianist
and I really liked that video.
But just like with Andrew Wong,
I was really inspired by Nahre's curiosity and willingness
to branch out into different genres of music
and to learn from different artists and performers.
She has this entire series on her channel
where she does like,
Flamenco dissected by a classical musician
or synthesizers dissected by a classical musician.
All these videos are absolutely fantastic.
And I do wanna shout out the synthesizer one in particular
because it is the video that inspired me
to learn how synthesis works,
which was always kind of something
that I just thought was magic.
And I never really understood kind of how
you build the kind of tones you want.
But once I watched her video,
and then went down a rabbit hole
of watching some other videos, I got it.
And I finally realized like,
oh, it's just oscillators and you're just kind of like
adjusting the voltage that's applied to an oscillator,
you're adjusting filters and huh,
like that's the foundation of all like atmospheric pads
and all kinds of different sounds you hear
and lots of songs you've heard your entire life.
So I definitely wanna give a shout out to her channel
and just her general curiosity and tendency
to explore different areas of music
because it has definitely benefited me.
And that brings us to channel number nine
which I'm actually going to let my friend Martin
tell you about.
- This year I picked up a new skill, which is pixel art.
I've been interested in pixel art for a long time
since I was a kid but I never really took it seriously.
And this year I finally decided that
I wanted to start taking it seriously
but I ran into some problem points
and I found Pixel Pete's YouTube channel
to be particularly helpful there
especially a video called pixel art 101 color palettes
because I had never really thought about how you could take
different colors and make them feel
like they belong together.
Check out my SoundCloud.
- [Frank] You don't have SoundCloud anymore.
Didn't you delete it?
- I did delete it.
I don't have a SoundCloud.
Okay, and that brings us to the final channel on my list,
which is going to be Christopher Rhodes over at YCImaging.
So 2019 was definitely the year of the camera for me.
Like I said, Matt was kind of the main guy
who inspired me to upgrade my camera setup,
upgrade my lighting game,
all kinds of stuff like that,
but because I also really got more serious
about music this year,
I kind of naturally gravitated towards
getting interested in how music videos were made.
For me making a YouTube video where I sit down
and talk to the camera, I totally get that.
But watching music videos,
especially really well made ones
I've always kind of been like,
that's a whole different level of filmmaking.
I don't really know how that's done at all.
And what I love about Christopher's channel
is that he is a professional music video producer,
and he kind of breaks down the lighting setups that he uses,
the camera settings, all kinds of stuff like that.
But what separates Christopher from a lot of other YouTubers
is that he actually posts finished work on his channel.
So in addition to videos
where he's teaching you how to do things,
he will post finished and polished music videos,
and it's great to see little clips, these music videos
that he uses as examples during his educational content.
It's great to see these being made and then get to go see
the final product
because your brain sort of makes a connection.
You're seeing how things were made.
You're seeing the final product and you kind of go,
oh, that's how we did that.
And that is what you can do with these techniques
if you apply them properly.
Now if there's a common thread to be found
between all the YouTubers on my list,
I would say that for most of them,
they taught me new technical skills that I was able to use
and able to really combine together to improve
the overall level of quality and creativity in my content.
And that's really what inspires me,
learning new skills from various areas,
and then combining them.
And this is really the foundation to becoming a creative
and competent problem solver.
You want to number one, practice solving tough problems.
But number two, build a wide base of knowledge
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So if you wanna start learning for free today
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Thanks as always to Brilliant for sponsoring this episode
and being a supporter of my channel.
And thank you for watching as well.
Thank you for an awesome 2019
and I will see you in the new year.
If you haven't subscribed already,
you can get subscribed right there
or check out my music channel right over there.
If you're looking for some pretty cool music I guess.
Otherwise I'm gonna put one more video over here
and another video right over here.
That's right two videos,
and you can smash your face and your phone screen
to watch those.
Otherwise, go do your thing.
I'm not your dad.
And I'll see you later.