Hey everyone, and welcome! I know it’s been a minute since I last posted anything online. For the last few months I’ve been busy trying to get this website you’re looking at finally up and running. Here you’ll find the projects I’ve been working on for clients, my homemade videos, goals for the channel, and some behind the scenes of the videos I really enjoy. You might be wondering though, why this website? Why now?
I had been giving it some thought about my future. What do I want in my career? Where do I want to be 5-10 years from now, etc. To explain I have to go back a bit to the beginning. When I first returned from Japan back in 2017, I was dead set on joining a gaming company either as a game developer, or somehow become a YouTuber. My main focus for the YouTube channel was on Friday The 13th the Game and I had positioned the channel as a bit of a news and theory hub around the game. Meanwhile I was learning game design at night.
By 2018, Friday The 13th The Game and its owners got into a gigantic lawsuit that would cause the game to cease all production on future content. As you could imagine, this was devastating for my channel. Sure, I had also made some mini games through Unity, taught tech & game design at a school, but at the time I felt like I was treading water. I wasn’t where I wanted to be. So I decided to reposition Mad-Eye as a let’s play channel… which did not go exactly as planned.
Enter the spring of 2019! This is when I found out a rather peculiar detail about myself. I discovered that I got more satisfaction from a video using a creative lens to showcase a game rather than just playing a game all the way through from start to finish. So I switched the channel’s focus from a let’s play channel to a creative gaming channel. Did this make me slower with uploads on the channel? Sure! But I had a lot of fun experimenting with the different effects. This is also when I had a bit of luck. Due to my time covering Friday the 13th for so many years, and also having a different perspective on content that wasn’t a livestreamer or let’s player, I was invited to join Gun Media’s Scream Team program as a content creator. Gun Media provided me some content creation equipment which really helped that summer when I got into making unboxing videos for Gun Media, comical tip videos for GTFO, a fan commercial for Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and experiment with irl content such as getting chased by a dinosaur I rotoscoped into a local park. Now keep in mind, the channel was not monetized and I was not making any money from my creative hobby. But I viewed this as preparation for what was about to come next.
Scream Team Lunch photo at PAX East 2019.
2020, the year of the pandemic. Everything shut down and my focus turned entirely to the safety and wellbeing of my family and friends. I didn’t upload for what seemed to be months at the time and like many people, I felt lost. The Scream Team shut down during the lockdown and the world paused. Then an opportunity came. One evening, I saw an announcement in the Hello Neighbor discord server advertising a video editing contest where the winner would have the opportunity to work with tinyBuild on a series of videos. I got my cousins and friends from the Friday the 13th days to help me with filming and submitted my entry within 24 hours. To my surprise, I won the contest and got to meet the producers behind my favorite game at the time, Secret Neighbor. I started with tip videos and after 3 months of consistent posting, they asked if I could create devlogs and other video types. After a few days of thinking, I decided to combine a news style format to break the news of a game’s updates which is how Secret Neighborhood News came into existence. Shortly after the first video performed well, I was offered a full time job and my passion for gaming & content creation began to pay the bills.
Fast forward to 2023, I had been working with tinyBuild for a little more than two years. Things were great but I missed the freedom of being able to post on my channel and I wanted to explore working with other brands outside of the Neighbor franchise. Working full time as a video producer, it also didn’t give me a whole lot of time to level up my skills or learn. So in February of 2023, I took the plunge to go freelance as a trailer editor and producer. Here I am today, still working freelance and tinyBuild is one of my clients.
So why this website and what’s with the rebrand of the YouTube channel? Well up until now, I’ve never had a central hub for all of my content. Sometimes I’m not going to get permission to post a trailer or video on Mad-Eye Yokai because its the property of a client. And not all videos are used for external marketing purposes. At the very least, by having this website, I can link to most of the projects I’ve worked on and talk about them. This also ties into my long term goal as a content creator in the gaming space.
So What is Mad-Eye Yokai Now?
You might be thinking, “Wait if you’re already making videos for gaming companies. Isn’t that the goal? Didn’t you already succeed? What more is there?”
Trailer editing is awesome. It’s creative, it’s challenging, and I’m always grateful to have the opportunity to work on some cool projects. But for me, that’s just one part of this journey – not the destination. With Mad-Eye Yokai I’m building something different. Of course I will always help a studio tell their story through a trailer, a devlog or any sort of project they need. Long term, instead of being hired to tell a studio’s story, I want to tell my own – with their game as the canvas. The dream is to have studios come to me not for editing work, but because they want their game featured on my channel, in the cinematic, creative way I love to make content. (skits, commercials, trailers, mograph bits, tips, and playthroughs with a story).
The freelance work is a stepping stone, but I hope Mad-Eye Yokai becomes a name studios recognize not for what I can make for them, but for what I can create for their game on my terms for audiences worldwide.
