Student Profile: William Barnes

This is one of a series of profiles featuring the DAC Capstone cohort of Spring 2020.

My name is William Barnes, I live in West Bend, Wisconsin, and I play an abhorrent amount of video games.  

I have some technical background in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, and am currently working on Movie Studio 16. I have some experience with most major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. The reason I chose to be in the DAC program is because I had no idea what I was doing when picking a major. I wanted to do something with art, and I saw this as an option, so I choose it. Now that I know more about it, I’m glad I chose it. The people I met are fun and interesting, all with their own passions and talents. 

My creative work is focused on YouTube. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and I love the idea of making videos for the internet. I mostly want to make video game content, like Let’s Plays, since those videos are what made me want to become a YouTuber in the first place, and I love playing video games. 

Something I’m currently working on is the second part of a let’s play series, which is getting the “Knight’s Honor” achievement in Dark Souls Remastered. This is a sort of standard video that’s easy to make since it only really requires me to record footage of the game and commentate over it, and it’s much like the videos I watched as a kid that influenced me into wanting to make YouTube videos. As this is the second of many videos I’m going to make, I hope that someday I can get a following on YouTube and maybe make money from it.  

I only have two videos right now, one is the first part of the Dark Souls let’s play, and the second is a more… random video. I got the inspiration to make this from another video I saw that was a bunch of clips from a TV show, where the host asks seemingly random questions over and over. I thought it was hilarious, and late at night thought it would be fun to make my own version of it, with my own questions and statements. It started off with me just recording myself asking questions, but I hit a sort of block while doing so. I had all these ideas before hand about what to say, but in the moment, I couldn’t think of much. I ended up with 10 minutes of footage, which after cutting out most of the pauses, I had about 5 minutes of usable stuff. There was some of the usable footage I felt I should cut as well, some things I felt didn’t work in the video. I am proud how it came out, there were some good jokes in there, and the way I arranged the clips was satisfying to me. The experience was good, for splicing clips and rearranging them, and thinking about the order they should go in. It’ll help with future videos when I think about how all the footage I collect should be arranged for certain narratives. 

For people starting into DAC, creative practice is whatever you need it to be. If it’s sitting in a quiet room with a pen and paper, then do it. If it’s pacing the house talking to yourself, do it. If it’s shredding guitar at max volume until your ears start ringing, do it. The creative process is yours to control, and no one can tell you what you should do. DAC can help develop your creative process. I’ve discovered mine through it. I always had trouble getting started on things, especially the YouTube channel I am now working on, before I was in DAC. The class forcing me to make something for it helped push me to discover what I needed to start my creative process.