Blog : Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 14)

Welcome to the 14th volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This volume involves my discovery of the most popular YouTuber in the UK, a little bit of music and a couple of deeply thoughtful videos.

• The first two videos in this volume are from YouTube sensation   Charlie "charlieissocoollike" McDonell. The first video is of Charlie singing one of his own songs, with a little help from himself and the power of video editing (and it wows me how much you can do at home now-a-days) and the second is the video for a project he did called chart-jackers where he and a group of friends tried their best to take over the UK pop charts. Oh, and yes, that's Mr. Stephen Fry giving the tag line at the end.
• The next video in this volume is by Ben Chan who is mostly an online violine teacher, but is also a lover of video game music. He's playing the theme to Chrono Trigger, which as you've probably guessed is a pretty easy way to make me favorite a video.
• The fourth video is one I've had a bit of a hard time figuring out. It is, as it calls itself the PEN story, and it's a beautiful stop motion film built out of photographs. As I mentioned though, I don't know why it's called the PEN story, nor about who made it or why. It's upbeat and fun, however so it's worth a watch.
• The fifth video is another interesting one. Called "How to be Alone" and is a video by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman of the poem (of the same name) by Tanya Davis. It's a beautiful contemplative piece that's quite compelling to watch in addition to being interesting life advice for a thing many people (myself included sometimes) are not very good at.

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 7)

This week the grab bag of things that once held my attention on YouTube (known of course as Favorite YouTube Videos, volume 7) is all over the place with stuff that at one point held my attention. For what ever reason that means that this week we get a few cool stop-motion animations, some inspirational moments with a group of cellos and two very different kinds of video game covers.

• I love animated short films. The one things I'm most likely to see at the annual film fest here is the  animated shorts program. I enjoy getting my mind bent around new ways to look at what's going on in the everyday. This one, by PESfilm in a nifty take on making dinner.
• Interestingly right on the heels of that first video the second one is a commercial for RBC which we were bombarded with during some major sporting thing (I'm fairly sure it was the 2008 Olympics). I really like this for several reasons, one of which is the animation, the second is the structure of the one long pull back and the third is the architecture of the pavilion that builds up around Mr. Muffin. One of my favorite ads of all time.
• The next video is a cover of Final Countdown played on cello with orchestral backing. Need I say more?
• Brentalfloss is known for his Video Game Music ... With Lyrics series and this is one of the early entries. I like this one and will sing about taking the stuff of poor mangle monsters whenever the opportunity presents itself. I will say though that the one time I played this for my D&D group after one of their victories I was met with rather uncomprehending faces.
• Finally we have a remix of Mario music. It's missing a video (as a lot of music things do) and it's pretty housy (I think, I'm a lousy gauge of music genre), but it's fun and I think it would go well in a Mario game.