- Just four more days.
Just four more until I get this frickin' cast off,
and I start therapy.
So soon enough I should be able to start filming again.
Like, right now I cannot set up a light stand,
because you need one hand to kinda raise the light,
and one hand to adjust the knob.
It just sucks.
Like, I wanna do more filming and all this stuff.
Four more days.
Anyways, I was going through my old hard drives and
found some projects that I shot way back,
starting in, like, the year 2000.
So what is that, like 19 years ago?
Wow, when you say it out loud like that,
it's like, 19 years, that's a long time ago.
And what I really regret is I actually started
making videos even earlier than that,
but I deleted a whole bunch of them because back then,
my computer had 10 gigabytes of total storage.
10 gigabytes!
I mean, this SD card in this camera has 128.
YouTube wasn't around, so I couldn't just upload it.
I just ended up just deleting a bunch of films
after I made them.
I mean, they were terrible films, but for sentimental
reasons, I kinda wish I kept them so that we could watch
them now and see how cringy they are.
(laughter)
Oh man, so here's one of the earliest things I can find.
This was back in the VHS days.
I mean, we made this
before we even had any sort of computer.
What we used to do was to take a VHS tape and,
do you guys even know what a VHS tape is?
I mean, some of you guys might not even know.
Man, already it's like hard to watch,
just like, this whole sequence of my buddy
walking through the kitchen and the living room.
I mean, there's no purpose behind this.
This kind of sequence would be fine if we were trying to
establish something about his character,
like personality, lifestyle, etc.
But this is just literally him just walking for no reason.
We could have easily cut that out.
There's Dillon, my roommate now who used to be neighbors
growing up, so there he is.
Oh yeah, we went through this phase of throwing dummies
out of places.
We thought that was kind of funny.
We just took some clothes and just like stuffed it with
blankets to try to fill it out.
We'd just throw it out the roof.
We wanted to get a shot of the dummy actually landing
on the camera, so we took a pot with one of those
clear lids, like a cooking pot, we put a camera in there
to try to protect it.
And this is the shot we ended up with.
And yeah, that was the time where we were very much into
exploding stuff, very much not a good idea.
I actually learned it in science class, though.
I think it was sixth or seventh grade where they did a
little demo on igniting flammable gases, and they made a
fireball about this big, so I was like,
I wonder if I could do that at home.
And then I did it.
And then I made it bigger and bigger and bigger,
and pay attention to science class.
I don't even know why they're walking like that.
I just makes no sense.
Oh, I think we got some, like, fake blood from the
Halloween store, and we're like, let's put this in a movie!
Everything was so exciting back then, you know?
You go, oh look at this!
We could put this in a movie!
We could do this!
We could do that!
As silly as these films are, this was the stage of what I
really fell in love with filmmaking.
I was like, I want to do this forever.
This whole film makes zero sense.
We didn't script anything out, we were just like,
what could we go out and film that's cool and try to
make a movie out of it?
I mean, zero structure at all, but I guess everyone has to
start somewhere, right?
Oh, so this is 2003, so here I actually had a computer,
and that's right around the time when my brother
gave me, like, a pirated copy of Adobe After Effects.
Shhh, don't tell anybody.
Then he told me how to do masking,
and I was obsessed with that
for a while, and I'm going to mute the music on this
because it's all copyrighted.
We just used whatever famous song was out at the time.
But yeah, like right after we figured out what we could do
with masking, we were so obsessed with it for awhile.
Oh, and playing things back in reverse was
one of my favorite things to do.
So, we just made this whole movie,
which it really isn't a movie.
It's just us playing with effects and stuff.
And I remember this sequence taking forever to edit.
I was like, I'm going to fight myself.
That is a lot of work.
It was frame by frame masking, and it was a pain.
This shot here took me like four hours or so to do
just frame by frame, just cropping out my leg and my arm.
(laughter)
Let's see what else is out there.
Oh, that was my car growing up.
I mean, that was a lady repellent for sure,
but man that thing was so much fun.
(squealing tires)
(revving engine)
I think anybody's first car's like, holy (beep).
This is my car.
I can go places now.
Especially when you live in a quiet suburb like that.
So this is like a mockumentary, or like a documentary,
but you're just kinda making fun of it.
So we just kinda made up like a fake police department,
and this is supposed to be their bomb squad unit.
And of course we loved explosions, and we put some
fuel on his arm so that the explosion would ignite his arm.
That ended up being a pretty bad idea.
A really bad idea actually.
He was fine, but what's funny is,
Ian that's on the right here, you can see his arm just
get engulfed in fire, 'cause he's trying to use
a trash can lid to protect himself from this explosion.
And he was just like, "All my arm hair is gone!"
That was not good.
Don't do this, guys.
This is the first project I think we made where there was
actually some sort of storyline.
It's a 12-minute short film we made.
- [Dillon] My name is Doubleback Dillon.
They call me that because it's like I have two backs.
I have eyes on the back of my head.
Nobody has ever snuck up behind me,
behind my back before.
Except for when it was dark or I wasn't expecting them.
- We would literally just make up the story or script
as we went, so it wasn't that well planned out,
but at least there's some sort of story to this thing.
- [Dillon] This is the punk we're killin'.
We're burning him alive because it's cool.
- So basically the premise is they burn me alive
and they have to escape the house before they get caught
and the house is going to blow up because it's on fire.
Very Hollywood, because that's what happens to houses
when you put a little bit of lighter fluid on the cement.
And again, we love the dummy.
And this shot got me in a lot of trouble
with my mom actually, 'cause she had no idea what we were
up to, and she was sitting in the other room,
and she's like, "What the hell just happened?"
Because this entire house got really bright
for a few seconds.
What is going on?
I showed her the footage.
She was just like, "No."
This was around the time the movie, "The Ring" came out,
and "The Grudge," so that was like the big deal scary
movie at the time.
(ominous music)
(knocking)
(ominous music)
It was also around the time when we figured out how to do
really bad green screening, so.
(ominous music)
(screaming)
- Who are you and what are you?
- Let's skip ahead a little bit.
Dillion's the cop here, and he finally catches Michael,
but then me--the ghost--comes after Dillon.
(laughter)
Oh man.
These sequences are so much fun to make.
I miss doing this kind of stuff.
- I'm going to kill you!
- Teleport!
- Michael eventually kills me and the ghost,
and that is the end of that one.
Oh, also back then I also entered this little contest
where it was a commercial parody.
So we made this parody off the Nike commercial.
And we actually won first place and won, like, 500 bucks.
Just imagine being like 15 years old
and just like winning 500 bucks.
It was like, holy crap!
Of course that's when I learned my first lesson of producing
is when you get some money you split it up between
everybody, and what you thought was a ton of money
actually ends up not being as much money.
And then you burn through that money that you did get,
and it's gone.
Poof!
But it was so cool, actually making money off of a video.
I was really into editing back then.
I mean, I used to put so much effort into, like,
doing after effect stuff,
'cause I really wanted to get good at after effects.
And at some point I just became lazy.
This was kind of a fake commercial
we made for this fake company.
Doesn't exist, but it was more like an exercise thing.
But, yeah, man, I put in so many hours into doing
some of these after effect transitions,
and I'm too lazy to do those now.
We actually snuck into the school campus to get some
of these shots in the middle of the night.
And good times, I mean, Guerrilla filmmaking is some of my
favorite type of just going out and getting the shots,
stealing the location, and just getting what you can.
That was fun.
Good times.
We made all the stereotypical movies you can think of.
You know, the heists, the cops and robbers, you know.
All those storylines that doesn't take that much
thought to make, we made those movies.
(laughter)
I think one of the most useful things I learned
throughout high school was through some of these
commercial exercises, because that's the only time they
gave us hard limit on how long a video could be--
30 seconds, 60 seconds.
I mean, this one was a 30-second spot.
And when you have those kinds of time restrictions,
it really teaches you a few things on
cutting into a scene late and cutting out early.
Because there's always a whole lot of fluff
that can be cut out.
So just stickin' to the pure core elements of each scene
and still maintaining a good pace where it's not rushed,
but it feels nice and fluid.
That was a really good thing to learn early on.
And this is probably around the time when
I really got an idea of that.
I think one of the things that makes becoming a filmmaker
really hard is that when you're making the film,
you just don't know if you're doing a good job.
'Cause it's not like math where there's like a correct
answer and a wrong answer.
It's kind of like this thing that's very subjective.
No one can really tell you for sure if it's good or bad.
So you just kind of have to try it out
and play out the scenes,
and try to see everyone's reactions to
the scene, and say,
"Oh! This actually worked out really well."
"This didn't."
And then after you get more and more experience,
you look back on your older projects, you go,
"Oh! Wow, I was bad then, but I'm good now.
Now I know what I'm doing."
And then another two years goes by, you look at your old
stuff and you're like, "Wow, I was really bad then.
Now I'm good."
It's never ending, to be honest.
Like, I feel like I'm pretty good now.
But in two years I'll be like looking back and be like,
"That was terrible."
Just like when I look back
at my first YouTube videos.
Like, at the time I remember thinking, "These are
pretty good.
I put some effort into it."
But I watch 'em now and I'm like,
I was so stiff in front of the camera.
I mean, now I've just done it so many times
that I'm just comfortable--
(goofy sounds)
- -in front of the camera, doesn't bug me.
But back then I was so nervous, I think,
and kind of stiff.
And at the time I just didn't see that because
I didn't have the experience there,
but now I look back on my old stuff and I'm like,
ah, that was terrible.
And then in another two years I'm going to look back at
the videos I'm currently making and be like,
what trash was I doing then?
This is like a fake documentary where it was a rapper,
but he was very passionate about teaching and education.
And I love making these fake documentaries.
And at the time I was always like,
I wanna make movies.
I wanna make stories--something that'll play in theaters
and be really exciting and epic.
But, I don't know, after making a few different variations
of like, commercials, and this fake documentary and stuff,
I'm like, I actually really enjoy all this stuff.
So experimenting with different genres of, you know,
travel films or comedy films or action, drama, whatever,
it's good to just kind of feel everything out
and see what you like.
- - [Man In Hat] And look at your shirt.
Where did you get that?
- - [Man In Floral Shirt] Well, look at your--
- - [Off-Camera] Yeah, show him!
Show him!
- - [Man In Floral Shirt] --nose.
It's big.
- - [Man In Hat] Look at your, oh my god,
doesn't he need a wax?
- - [Off-Camera] You're right!
He does need a wax.
- - [Man In Floral Shirt] Well, you need to lose weight,
you fat.
- - [Man In Hat] Oh, did he just call me fat?
- - [Off-Camera] I think he just called you fat.
(slap)
- - [Man In Floral Shirt] Ow!
These movies are so dumb, but there's just like some
funny bits in here.
So this is the last film I made in high school.
And it was like a 30-minute film,
and I'm bummed right now because I just realized
I don't have the actual film itself.
I only have this trailer.
So at some point in the last 12 years,
I must've copied over this trailer
thinking it was the movie,
and then must've just deleted the original or something.
Hopefully I can find it one day.
Here early on in your filmmaking careers,
try to keep all your videos safe,
somewhere safe and backed up so you don't do what I did,
and just delete some of your old precious film.
It wasn't that precious.
It wasn't that good of a film, but still.
It's like, something you did a long time ago that you put
a lot of time and effort into, you know?
Now this one was the first time
I ever fully scripted something out.
It was about this guy who drinks this poison,
then before he dies, he just gets revenge
on all the people he didn't like.
And it was a high school movie, you know?
At the time, I thought it would be kind of interesting
and deep, but now I'm like, oh man.
There's so many things wrong with that film.
I'm also finding some old files.
This actually isn't that old.
This is only a few years old.
But I did this thing where I just hit the record button
on the camera for about 30 minutes and just recorded
normal, mundane things, and I just uploaded it as an
unlisted video to YouTube.
And the title is just, "Watch it in 10 years."
And it's kinda cool 'cause it's like some of the simple
stuff that you don't think is really cool right now,
you'll look back on and be like, oh my god!
Look at that!
Back then I was using MySpace.
That was interesting.
Remember that?
Go try it?
Go film just normal stuff.
Go talk to whoever you live with.
Go walk around your house
and just look at stuff for 30 minutes,
and then just upload that clip.
If you actually watch it back in 10 years,
you'll think it's cool, and you'll be glad you recorded it.
This is a little bit off-topic here,
but I got a question to ask you guys.
So a little while ago this travel company hit me up,
and they were asking if I wanted to do like a retreat
or kinda like a one-week vacation, maybe in Mexico.
And I could bring a dozen of you guys.
And this company specializes in setting up these trips for
small groups, maximum of like 20, but usually around 15.
And we would all just spend a week together somewhere like
Mexico or Bali or wherever.
And the beauty of the whole thing is we wouldn't have to
plan anything.
We just show up, they'll pick us up from the airport.
Until the very end they take care of everything,
including lodging, food, and all that stuff.
This is still super early on.
I just wanted to gauge interest, and I think pricing-wise
it will probably be about, like, mid-2000, again,
I have no idea.
This could totally change, but that's the range-ish.
So that would cover everything we would need for the
entire week, minus the flight.
We would have activities to do every single day.
We could do a couple of little workshops.
And what I like about the idea of it is that
it would be a small group,
so it wouldn't be crazy overwhelming or whatever.
And we would go out to these cool locations and shoot.
The goal of it would be to travel and have a blast,
but at the same time, we'll all bring our cameras
and try to get some awesome footage.
That sounds really exciting to me, but I just wanted to
gauge your guys's interest and see if anyone would
even want to go with me.
I don't know, if it's something that does interest you,
then shoot me an e-mail here, and before I publicly
announce it, I'll just send it out to everyone on this
little e-mail list and see if we can do this.
This would be awesome.
And I did research on this travel company, too,
'cause I didn't want it to be like FireFest or whatever.
Man, I'm having my fingers crossed that this actually works
out, 'cause that would be super fun.
Anyways, let's close this video off by reading a few
comments from my last video, which was all about
electric vehicles, electric skateboards, electric scooters,
one-wheel, which one should you get?
Top comment was from Pinoy Techdad.
"Really Gene? One broken arm isn't enough for you yet?"
(laughter)
That was a poorly-timed video.
The thing is, Segway sent me that scooter,
and I was like, yeah! I'll put it into a video.
I'll do an honest review of it.
And it arrived a few days after I broke my arm.
And I was like, well.
(crash)
"No more boards until you get Lefty an electric wheelchair."
I'm actually really excited about
Lefty getting a wheelchair.
We were actually once told that we don't have any
wheelchair options for Lefty, because her entire arm is
cleanly cut off.
And she was supposed to have a little nub to attach a
prosthetic to, but I guess they have a wheelchair for her
that they can custom build, so that would be awesome.
"Please do a video on your journey into filmmaking.
Are you self-taught, college, or PA?
Also, how do you store and save your footage?"
I store my footage on a bunch of hard drives,
and the issue is that I'm very unorganized.
Which is why I lost my short film.
I guess this video here is a pretty good example of
my introduction into filmmaking.
I don't know.
If you guys end up liking this video a lot,
then I could do part two of just like my early years
after I graduated high school.
John says, "Who wants to see a review of the DJI Osmo
Action from Potato Jet?"
Oh, you mean this thing right here?
Well, I do want to test it out, but my arm's broken,
so it's hard for me to do anything action,
but I'll get on it eventually.
"I'm working on masking one of your videos.
Please just give us a green screen, I'm tired."
No, please don't.
I am not giving you guys a green screen.
Although, I do wonder.
This blue is a easy color to key out.
So, I don't know.
Am I already at risk here?
Hopefully I'm okay.
(techno music)