What kind of Creator are You?

Hello again readers and thank you for joining me in another blog. You! Yes you! The one reading this now. You are a creator, an artist. And that is what Youtube is all about, a big community of creators sharing their work for the world to see. You have the power to show the world your vision and how deep you passion for creativity can go. The question is, what kind of creator are you? In my experience as an artist (not a professional one of course) I say we are divided into two different main classes. There are those who crate for the joy and satisfaction of creating, and there are those who create for the masses. Which category do you fall under?

Creating for Joy
Creating for the joy of creating is the category I fall under. Think about it. When you first learned how to draw or write how did that feel? The pride you felt of looking at your work stare back at you was overwhelming wasn't it? And then the thought came into your head "I want to make it better!". When you create for the joy of creating you are mostly making your channel for more of your satisfaction than anyone else. Why? Because if you can't look at your channel and videos with pride, how can you expect your viewers to?
Before Youtube, I was an cartoonist. I used to doodle a lot in school, even had my own little comic book series (my goal was to make it to a 100 issues, small childhood dream of mine...only made it 70-80 I think). But one of my favorite things was passing my comics to my friends and seeing them get excited about it and looking forward to me drawing the next issue. As I got older and soon went to college, I started seeing that my passion wasn't in drawing, but in writing. My dad used to always say it best: "You can draw a character standing still but give me a whole backstory on him without him doing anything." So I realized that writing was more of my forte. I wrote a couple of books and even have the rough drafts of them posted on Deviant Art. Throughout me posting them I had only ONE person read most of them, and that was enough for me to keep writing. I can look back at my stories with pride and I love rereading them even though nobody has read them aside from me. It'd be nice to have em out there but it's not crazy important.
Now when Youtube came along I really got to be creative. This was my chance to show my love for being a gamer and my imagination put together. Though my channel has went through a lot of changes, I always tried to keep it in my style so whatever viewers did stay with me would be able to tell me from the other creators in the community. When I make and post videos I do it for me first, community second. I love looking at my work and I always love to improve on what I've done so when the viewers do come, they can appreciate and enjoy all the hard work that went into my channel.

Creating for the Masses
Creating for the masses is not necessarily a bad thing, just some people do it to extreme. See in the professional world, everything boils down to Art vs Commerce, and Commerce always win (stolen from Hey Arnold lol). But it's true, creativity has been stifled these past few years. Look at cartoons nowadays and compare them to how they were back in the 90s. There's nowhere near as much animation as there was back then, there's not even that much depth to cartoons that much. Why? Because it's all about creating for the masses. Same thing with video games. Nowadays I get better gameplay and story on a Sega game than I do on a PS3/360 game. Why? Because somewhere along the line the creators decided to focus more on how "graphically beautiful" the game looks instead of gripping the story is, or how great the controls feel. When I created my Streets of Rage video for my channel, I was almost blown away at how much I was having fun on a SEGA game that's over 10 years old. The only answer I could think about was that the audience of today is different from the audience of yesterday.And that's where creating for the masses gets troublesome. When you create for the masses you are basically doing whatever appeals to most to the overall audience. So if you see COD, minecraft, and Diablo 3 are getting lots of viewers, you create your channel as such and do your best to get people in. But let's say you don't really want to play those games? What if your favorite game was Broken Sword? Well good luck with that, no one plays that game, nor many people even know what it is. And that's where creating for the masses is tough. If you push too extreme on it, you throw away the projects you really want to do in exchange for the hopes that you'll get viewers by appealing to the current popular demographic.

The trick is to find balance. You have to crate for joy as well for the masses. If you can find a way to make videos that you enjoy posting and at the same time reel in viewers, then you're golden. It's really tough to reach that sweet gooey center though. If you focus too much on you, then you risk alienating yourself from the audience. If you focus too much on appealing to the masses, then you risk losing all control of your creativity and have to follow the herd. I believe one of my new friends I made on here asked me a good question. He asked me how I got so many views and I answered, honestly I don't get that many views anymore. And it's true I don't. I get maybe 1-5 views per video I put up. But the thing is that I don't let it bother me because it's all for fun. I told him, as long as he's creating his channel the way he wants to create it and he's having fun, then that's all that matters. It's good to advertise and make your channel known, but don't ever forget to create in the style that's comfortable to YOU. After all when we enter the channel and watch your vids, we're entering YOUR world. So try to make it entertaining k? ^_^ This is the Twilight Dragon signing off, til my next blog