A lot of good stuff has been happening recently! I recently got accepted onto the YouTube Partnership Programme, which basically allows me to earn revenue from YouTube, which is pretty handy, and I also get to add banners on my channel and stuff. I’m quite proud of my redesigned channel, check it out! Now all I’ve gotta do is make some videos, which is proving to be quite difficult. But I’ll think of something soon. I want to get out a new video every week at the very least. I’m getting a new camera for Christmas so my videos will look a lot nicer too next year!

I’ve entered my final year at high school, and in September next year I’m going to college! It’s quite weird to think about right now as I still feel quite young, but by this time next year, I’ll be sixteen and I’ll have left high school and gone to college. I’m still a little unsure about which college I’m going to, but I think I’ve decided.

And I’m going to New York in February with school for five days! That’s gonna be a ton of fun, some of my best friends are going too. We’re visiting the Empire State Building, going on a walking tour of the main streets, visiting Macy’s, visiting NBC, and going on a boat tour around the Statue of Liberty. There’s probably more but I don’t have the list with me. I’ll try and shoot a video out there too.

And I think that’s all I’ve got to say really. I’m getting close to 1k subs on YouTube so I have no idea how I’ll celebrate that. If you have any ideas, comment below or message me on twitter (@MarkLudford), and I shall see you guys whenever I decide to update again. I’ll try and do it before the end of this year :p

Bye!

After almost five months away from regularly making and uploading Minecraft videos, I decided enough was enough. I’ve tried to record a new episode of my Minecraft series at least 8 times now, and every single time there was problems with the audio from my microphone. Sometimes the sound kept cutting out, other times the sound was too quiet, and other times the sound actually wasn’t in sync with the the gameplay, while the Minecraft sounds were. There’s only so many times I can keep on trying, and when it actually worked for once, the filming was interrupted by my mother and I couldn’t finish it, and I just gave up with my headset. I put it in my drawer and didn’t pull it out again. It was only £10, so I couldn’t really complain. The last time I used it was with the Rollercoaster video, but the commentary quality came out that bad that I had to replace it with an instrumental of Still Alive, which actually worked really well and some parts of the song seemed to sync to the gameplay, such as when the song kicks in properly at the chorus and the view changes to third-person, that was completely coincidental. But for a guy who likes to commentate, I can’t really rely on random coincidences all the time. But although I missed commentating, I was getting tired of just doing an average let’s play, and I wanted to make something different and something not so much of a cliché. If I was gonna continue to make videos I had to change what direction I was taking with the series.

Yesterday I was walking aimlessly around Manchester City Centre on my own, and I decided enough was enough. I went into Argos and bought a brand new, slightly more expensive but higher quality headset, and I got home and set it up. I started recording gameplay with Fraps to try it out, and before I knew it, I didn’t even want to stop testing it and that same recording session quickly turned into my next Minecraft video. The sound quality is so much better and it syncs and I have literally no problems with it at all. Overall, I’m really happy with it, and it means I can continue to create Minecraft videos for YouTube, which makes it even sweeter. It’s not gonna be an average let’s play anymore, I’m going to showcase mods, custom maps, updates and whatever the hell I decide to create. I’m done doing what everyone else does, and I’m gonna be different with it.

- Mark out.

I also just added a new header because the other one wasn’t really that good quality-wise. Oh well. I’m just gonna write about life in general now.

I have two exams left before the end of Year 10, Chemistry 1A and 1B, and I am not looking forward to either. I like Physics and Biology is meh, but Chemistry is just too comiplicated for me to understand, especially seeing as I missed the first few lessons of it. So far I’ve taken English 1 and 2, Maths non-calculator and calculator and Religion. In all honesty I’m not 100% confident with any of them. English paper 1 was great, and paper 2 was meh. Maths non-calculator was hard as hell, and the calculator was actually not that bad. Religion was just, ugh, don’t even ask. I just need to make sure I revise and revise and revise for the Chemistry exams, seeing as Science is the only subject I’m doing alright in and I’m not prepared to mess it up now.

My first vlog is on 1,500 views right now, which may not seem like a lot, but when you look at the views my other videos got, it’s actually doing quite well. It was in the suggestions of charlieissocoollike’s video ‘Hello’ for over a week which helped to boost it too. I’m going to film a second one sometime this week, and it’ll essentially be a Q&A video. The only reason I’m doing a Q&A is because I realised my subscribers don’t actually know that much about me apart from what’s written in my channel description, and it might be nice to get a little insight into who I am. If you wanna ask me something for the video, do it here and I’ll answer it in the video. When I upload the second vlog, my channel’s gonna get a new video at least once a week (finally getting into a routine with this), either vlog or minecraft related. I want to film some sketches and stuff too at some point, but I’ll need to get more people on board for that. My wall of stuff is around 3/5 of the way completed, I need to print some more stuff off to finish it though.

And that’s about it, I’m kinda boring. Oh, and I didn’t watch any of this series of Two Pints. Mainly due to the lack of television in my bedroom, but still, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyway.

- Mark out.

Recently, Sam Pepper, a former Big Brother UK contestant, started playing Minecraft. He tweeted asking if anyone else played it, to which I replied to, and we generally just talked over Twitter about it. We played it together a little and he recorded some of the gameplay in case he wanted to upload it to YouTube. And that he did.

It was uploaded on Monday evening, and within 24 hours it had over 250 comments. I’ve gained a few more subscribers and about 50 more followers on Twitter, which was nice. My Twitter mentions are flooded with support messages, just about everyone is asking me to follow them back (which I don’t do by the way, sorry. I wanna earn followers rather than follow4follow, sorry to disappoint if you asked me.), people are saying I’m cool, and it’s just pretty freakin’ awesome. I’ve never really had anything like this happen before, I mean I have a video on YouTube with over 200,000 views, but that’s built up over the last three years and I got used to that. If it got that many views overnight, it’d be a different story. Sam’s used to his popularity by now, but for me it’s just kinda weird to get my head around. One girl even has ‘@MarkLudford is amazing’. in her twitter bio. I’ve even been accused of ‘stealing his fans’ by one person, which was quite funny seeing as Sam was the one who asked me to do the video with him.

I’ll get used to it eventually, and I’m still making my own videos. Speaking of which, my YouTube channel turns 4 years old on Friday, so I’ll have to do something to mark the occasion. My friend Lewis is sleeping over at my house tonight (it’s apparently very early Wednesday morning now, so by tonight I mean Wednesday night) and I’ll get him to help me out with making a video to celebrate. I’m gonna try and make my 4,000th tweet on Friday, and make it about YouTube. I think these four months have probably been the most active I’ve ever been on my channel. I set some of my old videos to Private earlier too, because I didn’t really want them on my channel anymore and I didn’t want to delete them. My very first upload was set to Private too, which was a little hard to do.

In other news, Chip may be coming over from Ellesmere Port and staying in a two man tent with me, overnight in my back garden. Why? Because she wants to have a sleepover and I want to stay in a tent, so we’re merging our ideas. The plan is: I meet her at the train station and we spend some time in Manchester, when we get bored we go to my house. We watch some DVDs, set up the tent before it gets dark, put quilts in it and sleeping bags and all that jazz, and we stay in there all night eating food and talking about nothing. We’re nerds and things like this are fun, shush. It will be TOTALLY MANLY.

And now, finally, a rant. My favourite show on TV returned last night. And it was nothing like I hoped it’d be like. Two of the original cast members had left out of the four remaining. There were five originally, but one left at the end of series six and now at the end of series eight apparently so have two more. The series lost it’s original creator, and one of the original cast is now in a wheelchair. There’s two new cast members, one of which is just a massive rip off of the one that left at the end of series six, except more scouse, and the other is a homeless person. I never thought I’d say it, but I wish Two Pints had ended when Ralf Little said he wasn’t returning, because since then, the show has just been the same story over and over and now they’re trying to revive it. Painfully. They even changed the theme song, which was the best bit. But that’s just my opinion and I guess other people might enjoy it. I’ll probably end up watching the whole series just because it’s Two Pints, but it’s just sad to see what it has become.

And on that slightly depressing note,
- Mark out.

It’s quite a big thing for me to actually have done this. I’ve wanted to make one since the very start of my time on YouTube, and I filmed like two of them and edited them, but never uploaded them (thank god). When I was 13 I tried again and for some reason I sang in it. Early last year I tried again and it actually came out quite good, but the video quality was way too high for my old computer, and so I could never edit it.

Now I’ve got a camera, a tripod, a decent computer and editing software, I pretty much had no excuse, and so two days ago I stood in front of my camera and tried to film a vlog without a script or a plan or anything. And it was awful. So instead I just took some photos on my setup and went to bed. I tried again the next day, and decided it’d probably be best to write a rough plan and then improvise the bits inbetween. I don’t like writing scripts for myself that much but a plan was pretty much required to even stand a chance. I planned it, filmed it and edited it in the space of a few hours, and put it on YouTube the same night. I left my laptop on to upload it while I slept, and by the time the 500MB file actually uploaded, and I saw it this morning, I came across every YouTuber’s nightmare, the big black border.

Basically I’m an idiot and didn’t export the video at the right settings. So this morning before I went to school I deleted the vlog from youtube and exported the video again with the correct settings and left it to upload while I went to school, but made sure it uploaded as a private video first before it went live so I could make sure it worked.

I got home this afternoon with the video at 66%. My connection had dropped during the day. So I cancelled the upload, reuploaded the video (set as a private video) and FINALLY, it worked. At 5:00PM on the dot I let the video go live, and thus, I have a vlog.

So far I’ve had nothing but postive response and it’s amazing. I’m gonna upload a vlog every two weeks I think, if I can actually stick to that schedule. Hopefully I will.

Thanks for reading, and if you watched this then please leave me some feedback. Bye (: