LEAP 1 — JON BOIS
After over ten years of watching online creators on YouTube, choosing a single one to talk about for this project was a tough call. There were obvious picks like Michael Stevens of the Vsauce channel, LEMMiNO, who produces highly professional documentaries despite being a one-man team, or Tom Scott and his varied collection of educational videos. I also could’ve picked from dozens of ”oddball” creators, such as Alan Resnick, Brian David Gilbert, or Cyriak, just for how uniquely creative all of them are.
Instead I decided to talk about Jon Bois; innovation editor at SB Nation, and video content producer for Secret Base, SB Nation’s YouTube channel. I picked Jon because of his consistent quality, superb storytelling, and his ability to make non-sports fans (such as myself) invested in his sports videos.
I started by watching most of Jon’s videos, taking note of common elements that make his work so engaging no matter the topic. I also reviewed the comments on some of his videos in order to see what peoples’ reactions are to Jon’s videos and what elements are most appreciated. Using this, I determined which video to focus on, and wrote a rough script based on what I wanted to talk about. I chose to analyze the two-part Chart Party special, ”The Bob Emergency,” because I felt after watching many of his other videos, it was the best representation of what most people like about Jon’s video content.
The idea I had for my video was to recreate the visual style of Jon’s videos to give a rough idea of what they’re like to people who have never seen them before. Jon primarily uses Google Earth of all things as his primary piece of editing software, and to save myself the trouble of learning how to make a video with it, I instead created a 3D camera in my usual editing software and placed all the images and text at varying heights and positions relative to the camera. I also did a quick search for the primary font Jon uses (most likely Bebas Neue) and used it for most of the text.
Once I had everything where I wanted it to be, I finalized and recorded my narration. I then placed it into some basic audio editing software and cut out the long pauses and the times where I messed up a line. Once that was done, I imported the finished audio file into the video editing timeline and used keyframes to move the camera based on the pacing of the narration. I also had certain images and text appear based on whether or not it was in frame. Once that was done, I added some text at the end giving credit to some of the images used, then rendered the entire video.
While nothing during the video creation process was new to me, I had never made a video like this before, and I found recreating Jon’s style to be surprisingly fun. The biggest problem I had while making it was rendering the video, as my computer struggled to process the entire thing, presumably because it had almost 100 layers of images, text and video. I also had a tough time trying to figure out how I wanted to organize each part and how they all fit together. Making a rough semblance of a Chart Party or Dorktown episode for a 3 minute video definitely made me appreciate the work that goes into actual episodes, which have reached lengths of over 3 hours. Though I’ve only been watching his videos since the release of 17776 in 2017, Jon Bois has quickly become one of my favorite creators on the internet, and I think the video I made really shows that.
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