Do something this cool with your time. I DARE you.

Some people's creativity and talent never cease to amaze me.  I wrote in a number of previous posts about different people who are incredibly good at what they do.  With some, you could say they were geniuses of their respective fields, but this post is to talk about those people who haven't spent 10,000 hours on one thing in order to become a genius at it.  This is about people who have a talent and use it to do amazing things.  It's also about people who might not even necessarily have a "talent," per se, but they have something, and they take that and run with it.

During my Freshman year at Emerson, my "Foundations in VMA [visual and media arts] Production" class had a whole unit on what you can do with YouTube.  For example, our professor introduced us to this guy:

I know that, a lot of the time, the stereotype of people who sit at their computers all day making videos of themselves is usually some nerdy (somewhat creepy) guy with glasses and acne.  I always knew that that wasn't actually the case, but I was never actually aware of the full extent to which people could take YouTube until that production class.

I look at people who get famous on or create a viral video on YouTube, and I can't help wishing I could do that.  There are people like this, who have a whole channel that is completely made up of vlog-esque videos that are mainly meant to entertain:

I follow both of these guys' channels on YouTube and I think they're fantastic.  But if video blogs aren't your style, not to worry.  I've got other things that are just as great in a completely different way!  I discovered the following about a year ago, but I just sort of rediscovered it recently and it's what gave me the inspiration for this post.  So first, watch this video (it's not the super creative, fun type of video I was talking about earlier-- so just bear with me for 2 minutes and 52 seconds):

Although this isn't really the main point of this post, this girl got a number of threats, etc. after she made this video (I don't know the exact details), and I believe she ended up dropping out of UCLA.  So there's a cautionary YouTube tale for you.  HOWEVER, what I really loved about this was, among all of the angry, inflammatory video responses that this video got, there was one that I think made probably the same point that everyone else was trying to make about how insensitive and ignorant this girl sounds, but this guy did it in a way that 1) actually got his point across in a way that people would listen to him (the video has over 4 million hits), and 2) was completely amazing and hilarious:

So that's another cool way to use YouTube.

THEN, there are things like this, where an ENORMOUS collaboration of (most likely) complete strangers get together and create something huge and creative and legitimately entertaining (it takes a minute for your brain to get used to the way it changes-- I don't actually expect you to watch the whole thing...you can just sort of skip around after the beginning- but it's really fascinating):

So anyway, I think that it's incredible how much everyday people can do when they have a camera and the internet.  I tried my hand at YouTubing very briefly (I won't even give you a link to my YouTube channel- that's how undeveloped and lame it is), but I realized that I like the way I come across in writing quite a bit better.  But for what it's worth, I have enormous respect for people who can create things like this.

Ok FINE- here's my favorite video that I made (originally for a class anyway) that I ended up putting on YouTube-- I just got a nice comment on it recently, so it gave me to confidence to put it up.