Hi guys,
It's Birchmark's birthday. My business which shares my username, Birchmark, came into existence two years ago.
My business started as a business selling shirts that I heat pressed designs onto, with a YouTube channel as a secondary thing. The YouTube channel came into existence slightly before Birchmark was completely set up (business name etc) but the business as a whole came into existence two years ago to the day.
The YouTube channel was intended to be mostly a gaming channel. My inspirations to go into gaming were Matt Shea and Oompaville. Matt Shea was the first lets player I ever watched and I found him through looking for stuff about The Sims. Matt Shea has made some very entertaining Sims videos throughout the life of his channel. I discovered Oompaville through Matt Shea as they sometimes collaborated. I decided I gained a lot of value, entertainment and enjoyment from these videos and I decided I wanted to try to make gaming content myself. It is a genre I am passionate about creating content within.
This is a playlist of my very first lets play:
I progressed from this point and got better at commentary and started experimenting within the gaming genre. Some videos had webcam and some didn't and some videos were only me whereas others diverted a bit from a traditional lets play format and were made up of footage from me playing with my partner and friends. I entered Adobe's Make the Cut competition and made a music video. I started using animation in my videos too. I started posting videos in other places. I posted on Vidme for a while before it went under. I tried dtube a while after discovering Steemit, but I personally had too many issues both on the uploading side and viewer side for dtube to work well for me.
Now I post each video of mine on DLive, Dailymotion and YouTube. Some videos exceed 2GB which is the limit for both Dailymotion and DLive so these videos do go through a program called Handbrake which compresses them but it does a reasonable job of compressing it in a way that still looks relatively good quality.
The first video I put on Dlive was actually part of a post I was making about my progress with #steemitjam:
https://dlive.io/video/birchmark/81b4da80-3b17-11e8-8283-8f78150dfecd
It was a walk cycle on the spot of my character Pug Bee.
Pug Bee is one of my animated characters that I make videos about.
Her only video at this point is this:
I am intending to continue on with a series with her, but extend on this concept and take her from just popping up to say something every now and then to having full animated parts of the video based on the game being played and with her and other characters in it. Her outline has also been changed from black to a brown colour.
She's not my only character whom is animated either. I currently have a Skyrim series with a cartoon cat playing Skyrim as a Khajiit.
Here is a playlist of this series:
I haven't made one of these for a while now, but when I do it will be going up on DLive, YouTube and Dailymotion.
I am intending to make an adult cartoon featuring a mixed human and animal cast and Carrie (the cat playing Skyrim) is a part of that too. This will take a while but it is in the works.
I have also made two music videos on my channel, one live action using footage provided for a contest and one animated. You can find both of those in a playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTdx2tlqgSoRLeRzIKRfyADpGu-o3XxFI
The plan with my art and designs for clothing changed over time too. Now instead of heat pressing them, I sell them on print on demand sites such as Redbubble and Threadless. I have made designs in various themes. One theme I like is misheard song lyrics. I also like puns.
Here are some of my designs:
My designs are created mostly using a drawing tablet (the ones you plug into the computer and you input onto the screen by drawing on the tablet surface with its stylus thing). The designs are all either created in Adobe Illustrator, GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. These are the main programs I use for clothing design.
These designs (plus others) can all be found at Redbubble here:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/birchmark?asc=u
Steemit changed my plans for my business a bit yet again. Now on Steemit I share my art and gaming and animation content, but I also do more.
I am sharing an ongoing fiction piece that I started writing a few years ago when I was part of a writers group. It falls into the dramedy and comedy genres and involves aliens. The writing did evolve over time when I was doing this as part of the writers' group. However it isn't fully written yet. Eventually I will hit a point that I will need to write new chapters which will be interesting since the earlier stuff was written a while ago now. I will be asking my readers on Steemit for suggestions for words or phrases that must be in the next chapter once it hits that point, as we did that in writers' group.
SteemitJam also encouraged me to take the leap and look seriously into game-making myself. I am currently studying a Diploma in Digital Media Technologies and that has involved programming, which I quite enjoy. It also involves things like video editing and animation, but programming is something I am finding I also enjoy. I have done some basic game making in my study, but I hadn't done some other than that to really speak of (I fiddled with some drag and drop stuff before too). I intend to keep on this path and do more gamedev stuff (and tell you guys about some of it). I am intending to create games related to Pug Bee too.
So Birchmark has changed a lot really in two years. I went from heat pressing shirts and making gaming videos as a complete beginner, to selling shirts on Redbubble and Threadless etc instead, sharing my fiction with the Steemit community, making animation, blogging about my work on Steemit, looking at game making and programming and making better gaming videos including some that cross genres between animation and gaming.
I don't know what the third year is going to be like, but I see these things being part of it: becoming serious about game development, gaming content, art on Redbubble and Steemit, more animation, blogging on Steemit, regularly sharing my fiction work on Steemit and more. Prioritising these things is not always going to be perfect but I intend to put effort into all of these things.
Steemit has become a reasonable chunk of what I do with my business as I'm sure Steemit has become a reasonable activity to many of you too.
Good luck to everyone on Steemit and elsewhere, and any other business owners. I'm excitedly going into my third year and I'm feeling optimistic. I hope everything works out well for all of you.
LINKS (including GameDev Steemit Posts and my Inspirations)
Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/birchmark
Dlive: https://dlive.io/@birchmark
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BirchmarkAu
GameDev Steemit Posts:
@birchmark/grass-tiles-dirt-tiles-and-an-upcoming-pug-my-first-steemit-jam-post
@birchmark/pug-bee-is-in-the-game-steemit-jam
Matt Shea: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUKMpHTtAG8bJY7bMSatNJg
Matt Shea Sims 2 Playlist (Very Funny) - Sorry, I don't know how to share his playlist without embedding it, but make sure to like the videos over on YouTube if you liked them:
Oompaville: https://www.youtube.com/user/oompaville
MY MOST RECENT FICTION POST: @birchmark/confusing-earth-chapter-15-sister
A POST BY SOMEONE ELSE ON STEEMIT THAT I ENJOYED: @superpil/anime-recommendation-bungo-stray-dogs
Thank you for reading and checking out my work (and the evolution of it) and for being part of celebrating Birchmark's Birthday! Thank you also if you have viewed my work in the past and been part of the development of my business so far.