Marcobat16, aka, the one and only Max Pacheco, has been kicking ass and taking names for the month of February. Max’s mission is simple; to make a video a day, every day, no matter what, for the entire month. Sound challenging? No, it’s actually been pretty easy, and it’s his project, not mine.
That was a lie. It’s been an incredibly difficult project, the parts of the whole having all ready summed up to what can be described as nothing short of Mr. Pacheco’s most ambitious filmmaking effort ever. Today being the 21st means that Max has all ready written, shot, edited, posted, and shoveled through piles of shit for just as many projects, and he ain’t done yet. Nor does he plan on quitting, but the process has changed more than once since its inception.
First of all, Max planned on doing this whole thing in January so he’d have all of Christmas break to start making videos. He’d have over a week of no school to get a head start on the thing, and he’d still be able to produce videos that he wanted to film on campus after the 14th. However, due to financial and logistics problems, things didn’t work out. And so it was that February became the month of video-a-day, which is also convenient because it’s the shortest month of the year.
But don’t get me wrong, we did film over Christmas break. As a matter of fact, we spent two days at Neil Cicierega’s house filming The Dark Knight Trailer Recreation, inarguably the most successful video of the video-a-day experiment. The Dark Knight project was Max’s plan to recreate the second theatrical trailer for the new Christian Bale Heath Ledger Batman movie, shot by shot, which he achieved with exceptional humor. And despite a handful of very strange terribly confused people, the reception of the piece has been overwhelmingly awesome. In a good way.
Max’s movies have featured me in front of and behind the camera from time to time, but they’ve also featured Neil on more than one occasion, Neil’s sister Emmy Cicierega, the ever present Spencer Hensel, Mat Clerrico, Marissa Jesus, Skylar Towle, Patrick Ryan, and some of Neil’s cats.
Secondly, Max has decided, in a move some would consider quite radical, to disable comments on not just his videos-a-day, but on all of his work on youtube. You’ll still be able to send Max messages on his main page, you can even still post things in a public form if you feel that what you have to say is so important to both Max AND his fans that it would be a crime if only Mr. Pacheco ever read it. Some youtubers, and I’m not going to name any names or quote anyone, have considered this move an act of martyrdom, youtube suicide. The desire to publicly comment on videos is essential to the community of youtube and the system of subscribers and community will fall apart without it. Or will it?
Let’s not forget why Max is doing this; he feels now, after all of the experience he’s gone through in this very big filmmaking odyssey, that the average youtube comment is cheap and disposable, and that the nature of the commenting system lends itself to the creation of non-thought out comments. One could also argue that it caters to the oddball ignorant and hateful comments that Max, myself, and all youtubers who regularly post are bound to get every once and a while. Before you judge him for his harsh act, maybe you should stop and put yourself in his shoes. And, is his act really so harsh? Does the quality of his work detract due to the lack of a system of communication between the artist and his/her fan base that fosters immediate gratification and tends to shun thoughtful constructive criticism. Let’s not forget that the commenting system only allows for comments that are 500 words long.
One (not necessarily Max) could even argue that the system makes it increasingly difficult if not impossible for quality discussion since the creation of the “ratings” system around the comments. I’ve thought more than once about how the ratings system has effected the nature in which people post comments now, because everybody on youtube knows that nobody wants to be the guy who’s comment gets voted way the hell down. It must have cost youtube a bunch of money to modify the programming of youtube so people could comment on very comment ever posted except their own. I feel that that time, money, and programming could have been put to better use increasing the maximum size of a video to over 100 MB and maximum length of 10 minutes. But now I’m just ranting, and I know #1 That eventually youtube will get better as technology gets better, and #2 I know better than to criticize youtube. I don’t want my channel to get taken down.
Here is where I’d put a frowny face thing if I knew how to do that.
Well, I think I may have said too much on a project that is most certainly not mine. There is more to Max’s videos-a-day than his recent act of disabling fan comments, but the nature of his act lends itself to significantly more questioning of both the form and content of youtube than I have brought up in the above paragraphs. The really important thing to notice is that Max, despite both questioning the nature of what it means to be an internet filmmaker as well as pushing himself to be better at being one, has actually done what he said he was going to do. Max has ranged from everything from movie trailer recreations, to stage plays, to short skits, to open forum video based discussions, to 3D flicks, to pseudo-documentaries, and to the downright odd. And as far as I’ve found, and believe me I’ve looked, nobody else has ever even attempted to make a video a day for any period of time even close to a month. Now no one can deny that Max is the first to really try; and a lot of people out there, more now than ever, are getting increasingly excited to see him become the first to succeed at it too.
P.S.
His subscribers have actually increased since he disabled comments. He has now broken over 600. Yeah!
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