Tag Archives: youtube

6 Steps to Youtuber Success Stories

andromedia

Everyone wants to be a successful youtuber star.  When SweptAway Tv started there were no YouTube stars.  The first videos were short and very low quality.  The key words and tags were still important but the total number of videos uploaded were small compared to now.  Now you really have to break through the clutter so following these 6 steps will help you get started

.'s house

  1. Don’t follow everyone else.  You’ve got the make your own TREND or unique idea.  Following will just bury you in the pile with everyone else.  The open boxing videos are saturated.  No more junk in the blender videos.  What can you do that is unique and different?1
  2. Video production tools are easy to find and relatively affordable versus 10 years ago.  3 point lighting will always help to make your videos look more professional.  Consider the background that you are shooting against.  Plain colors work better than busy prints.   You can always start with your smartphone and work your way up to a better camcorder or SLR that shoots video.3
  3. SOUND I can not emphasize how important sound is.  Whatever you use to shoot should have a mic  and  headphone jack.  If  the video is great but there’s no sound you are out of luck.  Canon makes a very inexpensive camcorder for under $200 that has both a mic and headphone jack.
  4. Be patient.  You should promote your channel on all of your social medias, add it to your email signature and tweet regular messages about your content with links to your channel.  It takes time to build a following.  See if you can get a return tweet from a celebrity with many followers.
  5. Add more channels as you grow.  Keep the same theme but add other viewpoints, opinions, variation to additional channels.6
  6. Add crew members as needed but with some ingenuity you can start alone.  Grab a friend to run the camera and listen to the sound for you.  Work together but you remain the focus of the channel and draw viewers in. SATV brittany koval and  fashion segment at Teen Angel_jpg

Hope these tips get you started on your way to YouTube success.  Be sure to check out the archives of the Swept Away TV videos.

Diana’s Guide:How to be (Heavy Metal) Hardcore

diana

Santa seems to be messing with me. I got some S-S-Stuff this Christmas. No, that’s not a stutter. It just so happens that some elf was looking through the music dictionary and decided to send me a stack of s-starting bands. He also attached a note with the words, “Santa Says Sorry”…And for good reason. Since we’re on the subject of studying the structure of the band names, we might as well also focus on the titles of their songs – all of them scream angst and non-conformity: Scar Symmetry’s Noumenon and Phenomnon off of their album Dark Matter Dimensions (2009), Samael’s Black Hole off of Above (2009), Suffocation’s Cataclysmic Purification off of their album Blood Oath (2009), Sonic Syndicate’s Burn This City from their forthcoming album in 2010, and finally, Sonata Arctica with Flag in the Ground off of Days of Grays. (2009).
But, to better understand the great weight of all of this metal, I’ve decided to make a guide to help myself and you in the meantime.

How to be (Heavy Metal) Hardcore

They’re more scared of you than you are of them. They loathe society. They are commonly known as punks, outcasts, rebels… but don’t be so quick to judge what is commonly known as HEAVY METAL.

Step 1: Appearance.
Hello! Dreads, much? A valley girl accent sounds worse to them then their grating voices may ever sound to us. Nevertheless, to be truly metal, your hair has to be either too long, too short (in all the wrong places, not there at all, or too dirty (example: Suffocation). The main singer in the follow A bit more difficult to bear and transform than the mass of whatever growing on your head is the coloring of your skin. Yep, tattoos. Prepare to get tatted up usually with an anarchist symbol or dragons. Maybe you will see some designs you like in the following videos, especially on the guitarists’ forearms. Last, but sometimes least, is the clothing. Keep it dark, dreary, and different. Surprisingly, tight black shirts are not as metro-sexual as one might believe (see Scar Symmetry’s lead singer as an example).

Step Two: Video Magic
We’ve covered the general basics, so let’s move on to the videos – appearance in action. Thankfully, unlike pop videos, the bands do not attempt to recreate the scene they are singing about. This occurs because of two reasons: 1. if this were in fact the case, most Heavy Metal music videos wouldn’t look that different (more on that later) and, 2. the video usually tries to capture the band in action, playing, since this is their most pure environment.
Effects:
Black and white
although really cheap, this effect worked well to show contrast in Scar Symmetry’s Noumenon and Phenomenon
A better documentation of this effect is evident in Samael’s Black Hole
In this video, they attempt to provoke nostalgia in a very 70s concert setting. They also used an old-video border (lame!) to enhance this effect. A for effort, but C for artistic creativity.
Cartoons
I know, right? You’re probably thinking that cartoons are such a childish idea. But, of all these heavy metal concepts, this is the best integrated one. Cartoons aid in depicting the utter havoc expressed through the song lyrics. Also, like in Black Hole, these cartoons/drawing repeatedly strike the same concept to ingrain an idea into your memory.
Quick Camera Angles
Although this may have the consequence of making your audience nauseous, this effect is apparently hardcore. All of the videos included this to a greater or lesser degree.
Setting
If it’s not in someone’s garage or an abandoned dirty factory, then some might say that you’re taking this “Heavy Metal thing too far, man.”
Nevertheless, an example of a more progressive Heavy Metal Video is Sonic Syndicate’s Burn This City which features some classy FX, like a helicopter scene along with a artistic background (of wrecked city rummage)
Fire
See Samael’s Black Hole,
and Sonic Syndicate’s Burn This City
Rammstein, Anvil, and Kiss all mastered the use of fire in live concerts. However, fire in live videos (albeit ‘hardcore’) doesn’t have the same desire effect. Scar Symmetry featured the most pathetic recreation of fire using a green screen which made them look more penniless than ruthless.
Along with fire comes burning and blood.
RED
a symbol for anger, hate, pain, and suffering. Widely used to emphasize a certain point and goes well in contrast to the widely used and abused black and white effect.
See Suffocation’s Cataclysmic Purification
Head-banging
Obvious, but true. You cannot achieve any level of hardcore-d-ness if you are incapable of producing an intense headbang. Just like machine guns, the guitarists (most often) attack the camera with their head banging flair/hair.
The more you move your head, the better you are at being hardcore.
In Suffocation’s video, the band members move so much that one would assume that they are absolutely faceless.

Step Three: Music
ahh, yes, we finally arrive to the musical aspect of this sub-culture. Heavy metal music has 3 distinct melodic components: Percussion, Guitar, and voice. Also, it has the ever recurring theme of isolation, death, depression which they use to attract a distinct audience.
Percussion
Continuous percussion results in a hardcore headache. Sonic Syndicate, for instance, alternated the drum pounding with vocals and light to moderate guitar.
Nonetheless, the drums need to be banged extremely hard. The more action the better. If you can actually break your drums (or your arms) during a show, mad props to you.
Guitar
Guitar riffs can be frequently over-used, such as in Scar Symmetry’s song. Again, in moderation, this effect will work well especially a bit after the halfway point of the song. Led Zeppelin was famous for their guitar solos. Sonic Syndicate and Sonata Arctica managed to skillfully demonstrate enough guitar to sound hardcore, but not too much to end up sounding like some punks.
Vocals
RAAAAAAAAAAWR
No, really. Gimme a throaty scream, growl, anything. It’s not just to create noise (although I would disagree), but it’s purpose is to reflect emotion.
In moderation, this effect can equate to a nice balance of actual singing and strong growls.
The growls also create an interesting rythmn by balancing out the percussion (as in Suffocation’s song).
Light vocals can create too much of a similarity to love ballads (which is soft/pillow/plushy metal). Sonata Arctica almost crossed the line with their (over)incorporation of soft vocals and extended ballads along with the desperate, “”Hope to hear from you soon,” lyrics. They also featured a Rush-like voice along with a keyboard-guitar (Key-tar!). This resulted in an eerie Hair-Metal mix of Pirates of The Carribean.

Need more help on being Hardcore? Just go to a show! For that, you’re going to need some protection (helmet, mouthguard, kneepads, life insurance). I’ll be sure to give you a How-to Article on that later. Don’t forget to keep listening and observing. Some good guides are Vh1’s heavy Metal Documentaries, the Anvil Docudrama, and my personal favorite THIS IS SPINAL TAP.

30 Seconds to Mars

images

Review: 30 Seconds to Mars- “Kings and Queens” Music Video
By: Alex Rivera

30 Seconds to Mars comes back onto the scene with their new single “Kings and Queens,” an alt-rock ballad with orchestral notations interwoven between the fast-paced beats of a snare drum and smooth guitar notes. The video itself showcases the band on a rooftop overlooking a city illuminating the night sky, while panning back and forth to scenes of a huge mass of bicyclists roaming the city streets at night, led by the band’s frontman Jared Leto.
In between shots of the bicyclists, you see some people in abtract costumes (specifically a cow suit and people dressed up as clowns on unicycles) while you have others performing stunts and tricks on their bikes like professional BMX bikers.

The video gets a little more random when one of the cyclists gets hit by a car, only to be awakened five seconds later by a white horse galloping down an empty side street. The cyclist then gets up, grabs his bike, and rides away.

Overall, I think the video was extremely random and had nothing to do with the song itself, although I did find some of the camera angles extremely interesting, such as the overhead shot of all of the cyclists riding all together in a whirpool-esque circle towards the end of the video and also the shot where all of the flashing lights of the bikes are lighting up the inside of the tunnel. But, ultimately, I personally believe that the band could’ve done something a little more relatable to the song in this video. However, maybe the abstractness of the video captured an underlying storyline that wasn’t directly presented to the viewer. All you can do is watch and see for yourself and come up with your own verdict.