In 2012, out of some sense of desire for aggregating all the cool videos I found for the holidays, and in part to prime myself for a holiday about which I was feeling particularly ambivalent, I launched a YouTube Advent Calendar.
I was surprised by how many videos I’d bookmarked by adding them to my “favorites” list. Seemed to be a worthwhile thing to keep going with the project, with no set theme, other than a random highlight of subject matter per week.
I’m always learning, watching camera angles, investigating why cinematographers shoot what they do, how the screenwriters do their thing. And some of the stuff on YouTube is downright silly, so offbeat that millions of people have watched these clips.
I took a screenwriting class at the end of 2012 as part of a last ditch effort to realign my skills, and that’s also inspired me to watch more.
Seemed like the thing to do.
I started posting the videos, one (or more) at a time, on my Facebook account, but I forgot to be consistent about the tagging and more than once I forgot to post the video link. Thanks to Facebook’s former no-editing policy, fixing errors was tough. Then FB changed the Timeline, which made it a LOT harder for me to go back and find the comments I’d written that went with the videos.
I’d already been poking around with WordPress and this seemed to be a better structure for me, with the ability to embed videos (most of the time) and to write the expanded introduction, not just a teeny note at the top of each video as in the playlists. And, as it happened, one of the playlists got corrupted, which broke a bunch of links. That did it.
So, now, here’s the work in progress, off FB.
NOTE: With a few notable exceptions, I didn’t create or post these videos. Most of them are viral (over 1 million hits), but not all. Most of them are cool things I’ve seen that other people thought were also cool enough to post. Some are offbeat and wacky, and a few are downright weird.
Unfortunately, copyright being what it is, a few have also disappeared over time; rights withdrawn, owners with second thoughts, and so on. And I’ve tried to be careful to use the official video and not a multi-copied source, because that happens a LOT on YouTube and it leads to rights being pulled all the time.
Still, it’s worth trying to catch these videos before the automated violation-sniffers take them down again, and you might still be able to find them given the title of the original video in my Blog. If something goes wrong and you notice a broken link, feel free to let me know by commenting here.
Aside from the complete YouTube playlists, this is my primary source for daily posts. Although there have been occasional bumps in the schedule, I do eventually catch up on the gaps.
The first complete Playlist (through the end of April) is here:
May through July Playlist is here:
August through Sepetember Playlist is here:
October and November Playlist is here:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=&w=560&h=315]
And here’s the last Playlist: The original Advent Calendar, with some modifications:
In January, I’m changing the format slightly, but I like posting these videos and I’ll stick with it for a while. At least till I run out of stuff to share.
Thanks for watching and have a Happy New Year!
–Betsy Marks Delaney