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youtube Archives - Sparkles Lund

Dec 08 2018
1

Director Brazil Launches One Take Sparks

By | Dance, Family, Friends, Vlogs, Work | No Comments

I have been working with Director Brazil – Helton Siqueira – on my videos since I started my YouTube channel in 2013. Brazil and his longtime friend Will Willdabeast Adams invented today’s popular class video format in the dance scene around Los Angeles, California in February of 2013. Shout out to Will for introducing me to Brazil. Being a member of immaBEAST has been a great learning experience for me. Not only have I learned how to train hard, but how to be a citizen of the dance community, a better person, and a better professional. Brazil gave me the experience in front of the camera, knowledge about YouTube, editing, and other things that I would have not been able to get from just doing jobs.

At first, my video channel was a way for sharing what I was doing in dance to family and friends. As my channel grew, I started to experiment with how to monetize my channel. Now my channel is different thing for me. It’s a place to curate my development as a dancer.

One of the things that you do not see much in dance videos today is one take videos. For a million different reasons, one take videos are rare because it’s incredibly hard to get everything right in a dance shot. Sometimes the camera angle is better in a particular run, other times the lighting is better, and a lot of times the dancer is better at different portions of the dance on different takes. You can do a lot to cut videos and add effects today to make videos look great. But it’s a bit harder to try to get it in one take.

One of the benefits of shooting over 100 videos with someone is the relationship and trust that develops between the director and the artist. So many of my videos were made better by Kalyne Lionheart who is an amazing editor. Between Brazil getting footage and Kalyne doing the edits, they turned out amazing. If you want to work with a great team, Brazil-Lionheart Productions is the way to go. They have so much experience.

Brazil has always been an innovator. When we set out to shoot 4 videos in a day, we knew that we were in for a long day. It was over 100 degrees in a warehouse in downtown LA the day of our shoot. When we started shooting, everything just clicked. We shot the first video 4 times and we honestly thought that every shot was great. So we stopped. That was when Brazil came up with the concept of One Shot Sparks – a series of one shot dance videos with no cuts. It is so different from the class videos you see everyday, or your typical concept video. So, we went with it. All of these dances were one take videos.

There are four videos in this series. The first one dropped on September 16, 2018. I danced to a song and an artist that I really love, Jade Bird. The choreography is special to me. One of my favorite people to work with is Cat Cogliandro. I love her work and am blow away by what an amazing woman she is. This video was my contemporary solo for the 2017-2018 season. It is very different than competition pieces that you see. It celebrates the spirit of Jade as an artist, and I really found a lot of sincerity in the dance. Thank you, Cat! Something American will always be one of my favorite dances ever. I appreciate you giving that to me.

The other three videos are choreographed by me. I have been working on my choreography for the past couple of years. I am teaching 5 classes a week and setting pieces on junior and teen dancers. I booked my first choreography job with a major TV studio this year (Thank you Disney and Bizaardvark). I hope that I will get more of those.

Thank you so much Brazil. You picked a great location for the shoot and made it all work for One Take Sparks #onetakesparks – 

Mar 30 2016
0
#YouTubeLA

Google Creator Day #YouTubeLA

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As you may know, I have been really publishing a lot of videos on YouTube the past year. It is something that became part of my career development strategy when I became a professional dancer. A lot of it was inspired by Will Willdabeast Adams, and his creative director, Brazil.  When I started my channel, Willdabeast had about 500,000 subscribers. Today he has 1.5 million. When I started I had about 25, and recently I got the attention of YouTube when my subscribers neared 10k. I was the only kid invited to Creator Day at #YouTubeLA, so my dad had to go with me.

First Observation – 10K is a magic number

Because I am in the entertainment industry, I personally know at least 20 dancers that have more than 10k subscribers. Many, like Jordyn Jones have over 500k. Because their subscriber numbers are so launched, I really did not see my 10K as a big deal. However, I learned from YouTube that it is a big deal. It puts me in the top tier of YouTube creators in the world.

To encourage YouTube creators, YouTube has developed 8 film studios with legit equipment in major cities around the world including Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Mumbai. When you hit 10K, you can unlock the YouTube space and use their film studios for FREE!

IMG_3032Best Practices

At YouTube Creator day, I was joined by about 70 other YouTubers to learn about best practices, discuss collaborations with other creators, tour the studio, and layout content plans.

There are 10 Keys to Great Content

  1. Discoverable – Will the content be found through search or related videos
  2. Accessible – can every episode be fully appreciated by a new viewer?
  3. Sharable – will viewers want to share these videos?
  4. Collaborative – Is the channel working with other talents?
  5. Targeted – is the channel targeting a specific audience?
  6. Conversational – Is there an element of speaking directly to the audience?
  7. Interactive – is there a way to involve the audience?
  8. Consistent – are there strong recurring elements?
  9. Sustainable – If the fans love it, can you make more of it?
  10. Inspiration – Is the content coming from a genuine place of passion?

If you are a YouTuber, or a video creator of any kind – consider your video content against these 10 content fundamentals.

What is the Persona of your channel viewers?

For me, I started publishing my dance to YouTube primarily to market my skills to choreographers who I was likely to see at an audition. Video has also become a popular way of submitting for dance jobs.  I direct book some of my work with choreographers who know me, or select me from my video. I am pretty sure that it was a combination of knowing the choreographer and my video submission that helped me book the Justin Bieber Purpose tour.

As my audience grew, I began to realize that my target was being reached by my videos, but the true personas of my viewers are kids like me; mostly other dancers. 81% are female and 19% are male.

YouTube has a hard time tracking kids (see Terms of Use).  So I think that my age range statistics are off. 16% are under age 17, 58% are 18-24, 15% are 25-35, and it’s all downhill from there.

One think I try to do is answer every comment on all of my videos. There, I see that most of the audience that comments are girls my age and dancers.

Content Planning

YouTube suggests that channel owners manage their content creation into three categories. The first is called Hero Content. If you are a fan of my channel, you may know that I have been doing this once a quarter for about a year, sometimes more often. For me, Hero Content is when I work with a choreographer and a professional camera crew on a set location to build a concept video. If you look at my videos with the most views, those are the Hero pieces.

The second type of content is Hub content. For me, these are videos that were either from conventions or stuff shot in my studio. It is published once a week and typically on Thursday if I am not too busy.

The third type of content is Help Content. This content is aimed at inspiring your page viewers, answering questions and stuff like that. I have a series of dance training videos on stretching, some Q&A videos and stuff like that. These are also known as special video that occur every once in a while on your channel.

Collaboration StrategiesCollaboration

One of lessons from Creator Day is to Collaborate with other YouTubers. By working with other channel owners with similar or different fans, I can build my channel viewers and subscribers. I had the opportunity to meet a bunch of musicians and we know that they always need dancers. I have also done some collaboration with other dancers. They are super fun.  If you have a channel and you want to collaborate – let me know!

Jan 08 2016
2

Shout Out To The New Times

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Fullscreen_1_8_16__1_52_PM…….That moment when you look at the newspaper and find an article about yourself it it….

A BIG SHOUT OUT TO Ryah Cooley, the Arts Editor for the New Times. Ryah and her photographer Dylan Honea-Baumann came out to the SparkLab studio between Christmas and New Years Day to watch me train and to interview me for an article that came out today.

A few years ago, being interviewed for a newspaper article was nerve racking. Now that I have gotten the hang of it, it is really fun. Part of the fun is never knowing what they choose to write about.

I am really happy with how the article turned out. I think that Ms. Cooley did a great job of telling the story that I am just like every other kid – going to school and practicing my sport.  In dance, you do not have friday night lights, you have performances that sometimes, if you are lucky, make it to television. Short of that, I love putting videos on YouTube and it is fulfilling to watch my art engage so many people. Last month my videos hit over 1500 hours of viewing! That is just crazy.

Thank you New Times and thank everyone who pays attention to what I am doing. It is great to have so much support.

Check out the article http://www.newtimesslo.com/art/13285/cyberfamous-teen-dancer-from-arroyo-grande-hits-1-million-views-on-youtube/