YouTube offers outlet for students

Within the game Call of Duty, one of the most popular war games on the market, soldiers are shot down as they try to defend their bomb sights from the enemy.

Junior Tavius Woods, an avid player of the game, figured out how to defeat the troublesome spots, offering suggestions and techniques on what types of guns to use in certain situations.

This is the kind of help Woods offers the viewers of his YouTube channel on Call of Duty strategies. He has more than 1,500 subscribers.

Woods, like many high school students, loves to play video games such as Call of Duty, a popular first-person shooting video game usually set in the time period of a World War. But Woods has taken his passion a step further than the average video game aficionado.

Ever since his sophomore year, Woods has been creating commentary YouTube videos on Call of Duty so as to help his audience defeat certain levels of the game.

“I basically help my audience do better in Call of Duty,” Woods said.

Woods was first inspired to create these commentary videos after seeing similar helpful examples on YouTube.

“I saw a bunch of videos on Call of Duty and people commentating on all of them, and I just thought I’d give it a try,” Woods said.

Using an HD PVR Hauppauge, a video game play recorder, Woods has created 33 videos that are dedicated to helping his viewers advance through Minecraft and the Call of Duty games: Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops. He has hundreds of subscribers following his YouTube channel.

According to Woods, it takes him a couple of days to gather all the clips he uses in each video he makes, and an additional couple of hours to edit and overlay his commentary.

Due to his large audience of 26,000 viewers and 720 subscribers, Woods was invited by email to become a YouTube partner and get paid a certain amount of money for his videos depending on the number of views he gets.

Lately Woods has not been posting many of his Call of Duty videos since he is concentrating on schoolwork, but hopes to get back on track soon.

“I don’t post that much anymore because of junior year, but I’ll try and get back on that,” Woods said.

Woods hopes to create commentary and game-play videos for League of Legends in the near future as well.

Other students have also dabbled in the art of creating YouTube videos, such as junior Sanjana Shukla and senior Kevin Lee.

Shukla, who used to be in the choir program at Saratoga High, has created 4-5 videos of herself singing songs such as “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele and others by Alicia Keys.

Although she does not want to pursue music as a career, Shukla says that it is a big hobby.
According to Shukla, her family forced her to put up videos of her singing because they think she does not use her talent enough, but she has grown to like it.

“It’s kind of fun because you get feedback and you can improve,” Shukla said.

Inspired by other YouTube channels, Lee has created three channels of his own. Lee no longer uses his first two channels, but learned “you can make a funny and good video out of a plain webcam and just being yourself on camera.”

Lee currently updates his latest channel with different videos he makes in the school’s media arts program.

“I upload them so I can show them to my friends and relatives,” Lee said.

Lee plans on majoring in film and will “always continue to make videos.”