So I’ve been asked to describe what a day in the life of a youtuber is like and when I thought about it, It became clear to me that there are no 2 days as a youtuber that are the same which I know is an annoying answer cause I think a lot of people say that, but it’s such a changeable job that we don’t really have a strict schedule and I think every youtuber you may ask will give a different answer to what their daily routine is like. For me personally, as a student and a teenager, YouTube is not my full time job, because I go to school every day and I also have a lot of other things, which I balance with my YouTube channel, be it friends, be it homework, be it my family life, so YouTube to me is more like a hobby and I can kind of pick and choose when I dedicate my time to it, seeing as it’s not my main priority all the time obviously is one of the things I enjoy doing the most, and I said, my favourite hobby, but if for example one week I have too much work to do and I have uni applications to go to, time to spend with my friends, or things to do with my family, YouTube will usually take a back seat, and in that case I’ll make sure that I have pre filmed videos the week or the month before which I can then stagger and upload when I haven’t had time to film at other times during the month.
So it definitely takes a lot of pre planning so that I can make sure I upload consistently and continue to run my channel but yeah it’s really flexible with when and how I dedicate my time to it. But let’s say, It was filming day, one day, my daily routine would be, waking up, having a good breakfast because I cannot live without breakfast but that is very individual to me. Then I’d make sure that my camera’s in charge, that my equipment is ready, I’d get ready myself, pick a nice outfit, decide on what I’m filming, even though the stage of deciding what I’m filming usually occurs much much before I actually sit down to film the video, so either the week before or either sometimes months before, I’ll have an outline of the videos I want to do and I’ll kind of script the key points I want to be making in that video so when it comes to actually filming it, I can be more organized about it and have more time to actually film the video rather than worrying about what to actually put in it. So once I start filming, I’ll obviously set up my camera, sit in front of the camera, then film it, and the filming process takes quite a long time, I’d say it takes one to two hours depending on what type of video it is. If it’s a sit down video, I’ll just sit in front of the camera and film it all in one go however a lot of the times I film daily vlogs or morning routines and those take a lot more time since they’re filmed over an extended period of time.
Then once I’m done with the filming, I’ll take time to edit it, so again, I usually don’t edit all my videos in one go because that would take way too much time, I usually do it over a period of 2 to 3 days or even more than that, depending on what type of video it is but again you can see that my answers are gonna be quite flexible here because YouTube is such a strange hobby, that no single video you produce will have the same prices behind it and every single video you make is slightly different, requires different editing process, it’s been filmed in a different way and therefore it’s just so different depending on how you go about it. But during the editing process, I start exporting everything on to iMovie or final cut pro depending on which editing software fits the video better in this case. Then I’ll go through the rough editing where I just take out all the pauses, all the times I mess up what I’m saying and then once I have the rough edit done, that’ll be the thing that takes the most time, adding texts, adding effects, adding extra things which I want to include in the video, maybe small clips of me trying a piece of clothing if I talk a piece of clothing in the video and all these extra touches, music as well which just makes the video even better and really help to make it up to starchy to the standard that I want.
Once that’s done, which as I said will take usually between 2 to 4 days sometimes more than that, I’ll just export it to YouTube, add all the tags, the titles and then it’ll be time to make my thumbnail which is probably one of my favourite parts! I love how creative I can get with my thumbnails, because, you know, it’s really up to you to decide how you want to present yourself and your channel and all, and your thumbnail is always the first thing that people see when people come onto your channel and see your video. It needs to be what makes people decide they want to watch that video, so a lot goes into that, the pictures, the drawings, the texts, which I hand draw as well using my ipad, and then once that’s done, I add the thumbnail, scheduler the video to go up, if it’s a brand partnership which is something I haven’t touched on yet, but if it a video is sponsored by a brand, then obviously there’ll be a lot of begging the scenes going on with that brand, so they’ll usually set up zoom call, where they talk about what type of video they want me to make, we divide the details, we discuss what type of video I can do to integrate their sponsorship within the video and then once the video is done, I have to send it back to the brand for feedback who then usually send back their comments, and then it’ll be a case of re editing to fit their comments, tot hen publish it, but I don’t do brand deals every time, I usually do brand deals usually one video a month, so that’s not most of the time, but when that does happen, there’s a whole process to go along with that too. So I guess that’s kind of a day in the life of a youtuber. It’s an on going process and you can obviously fit it to yourself own schedule.
interviewed by: Maya Darwish
Written by: Malak El Dawy