Since my YouTube channel was the direct result to the start of my web designing path (outside of Geocities), this is an appropriate place to talk about it. x]

You may ask, how did my YouTube channel directly resulted in the start of my web designing path? Here’s the story.

Back in 2002, when I found this free (but watermarked) frame-by-frame animator, I was just blown away. I mainly used it for banners for my now-extinct “It’s That RCT2 Site” website. Of course I didn’t like the watermark whatsoever but that’s what I had.

I was looking for a good animating program back in the summer of 2007 because I was bored and wanted to get back into some form of animating. I found the program called Pivot Stick Figure Animator (made by Peter Bone), and started playing with it. Having had some skill with frame-by-frame animation and the ease of use of the program, I quickly became attached to it (and quickly became quite skilled at it).

I searched on YouTube to see if there were any animations made by the program, and indeed there were. The first one I saw was PivotMasterDX’s “Stick Figures on Crack 3”, and ensued the laughter and replaying the video multiple times. I watched the previous Stick Figures on Crack videos, but that specific video was responsible for the start of my stick figure videos.

So, I started making random short animation skits in hope to make my first video as funny as Stick Figures on Crack 3. Of course I believed that was a long shot since I’m trying to make my first stick figure video to be as funny as the 3rd (and of course nothing can replace the Stick Figures on Crack series), but I felt I was skilled enough to make decent animations and be funny.

Then, on July 7, 2007, I compiled together my animations and posted “Stick em Up (Pivot Stick Figures animation)” on YouTube. Because of tags and the name (and of course the apparent hilarity of the video), my video quickly became a hit. Suddenly, I had subscribers, fans, and people who posted my video and claimed it was theirs.

From starting to look for a good animation program to the posting of the first video, that entire timespan was just less than a month. Then a week and a half after, I posted another video, “Stick em Down (Pivot Stick Figure animation)”. The number of subscribers and fans only grew faster. I took this as an opportunity to make a legitimate website as a sort of place where my fans can go to for new updates and other things. I didn’t want to use Geocities for this, and I felt that I know enough HTML to make a website from scratch. The first version of the website wasn’t at all good in any way, but it was a website that I made completely from scratch for the first time. And I knew I wanted to make it better.

That was the beginning of my web designing path.

So, relating to the title of the post, my YouTube channel (username “jayther”) now has over 9000 subscribers (9232 to be exact, as of the time I post this). I know that my highest viewed videos are responsible for this (first stick figure video now has 2.2 million views, second has 1.1 million views), but I’m still quite surprised that people are still subscribing to my channel, despite the fact that I haven’t posted a new video in two years.