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Escaping the YouTube rat-race Lewis McGregor was producing a series for YouTube until the project faltered, lacking support. This is what happened next…
of Death, had a 20-strong crew). We had backing from an Indiegogo campaign, but continuing after the initial £20,000 ran out was untenable. People who were signed up had to get on with their lives and became unavailable. Production was something that I tried to achieve on my own, using personal savings. “I remember the moment when I realised it was spinning out of control. It was a narrative scene. I was trying to pull focus with my left hand, holding the tripod with my right, pulling the dolly with my right leg, while panning the tripod head with my chin.” MANAGING EXPECTATIONS While for content creators, YouTube is an unstoppable force, it does ask a lot
BEING A VIDEO YouTube content creator can be a merry-go-round of pressure points. You have to produce regularly, on-trend content is essential, you need to be seen with the latest gear and your advice should be authoritative. But there is an alternative, as Lewis McGregor discovered. He has become a solo-narrative filmmaker. If this term isn’t one you’ve heard before, then it basically means you produce films that you can achieve on your own. But this doesn’t have to be as restrictive as it sounds – at least that’s McGregor’s experience. But what pre-empted his move from multifaceted filmmaker to going solo? “I had two web series that crashed and burned. (One, called Grim: A Tale
of its producers. By his own admission, McGregor fell into the trap of believing projects he liked on the platform were relatively simple to achieve. “It’s easy to be influenced and try to execute something similar. The truth is, even the smallest of projects and commercials usually have entire teams behind them.” His answer was to press pause on his ambition to produce multi-layered, plot- driven films. They would now be under five minutes long, and produced with the help of his experience, a few friends, and the gear he had already collected. His route to solo-narrative filmmaking would also include becoming a landscape videographer. Having the beautiful heritage coast of the Vale of Glamorgan just down the road helped.
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