Hi, I'm Charlie McDonnell: Video-Blogger, musician, and nerd. Have a poke around this website using the navigation bar at the top, or catch up with what I'm up to at the moment with my written blog, which you'll find below.
Seriously, almost three whole weeks without making a video, Charlie? Since the start of this year I’ve been doing my utmost to post a video every single week, there have been a few weeks where I’ve lapsed, but never three in a row like this. When you start getting emails from people asking if you’ve died, you know it’s been too long. When your FRIENDS start getting emails asking why I haven’t made a video, you really know it’s been too long. Still, technically I’ve just uploaded 12 new videos (including all of those that go into make an episode of Truth Or Fail) so I hope that makes up for it!
Some of you might recall this video from four months ago, which I made while I was actually in San Fransisco, in the middle of my visit to the Pixar studios. In the video, I talked about how I had interviewed Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, in song -- the more observant among you will notice that the song didn’t make the final cut in the video. As the months passed, my ideas for the video changed a lot from what I had originally envisioned before going to Pixar, and when the time came to make the video, the song just didn’t quite fit with what I wanted to do.
However, if I can find the time then I might always upload the song, out of context, up here onto the website. That is if there’s an interest for it. Also, there’s a lot of extra footage that I got with Lee when I interviewed him (which happened just recently actually, I wanted some more footage to beef up my video and, seeing as he was in London promoting Toy Story 3, he managed to find some time for me) so I might upload a longer version of that interview up here too. Hopefully I’ll manage to find the time to put those videos together!
Thanks, as always, for your continued support. It seems silly for me to try and “make it!” in the world of television or whatever, not that I won’t consider those opportunities if they come along, but in the mean time I really want to direct my attention to what I love to do. I’ll do all I can to make the best videos I can, and I hope you’ll like them! :)
So, VidCon is a thing that has happened. Never heard of VidCon? Well, it was only the biggest and baddest online video conference/gathering that there ever was, and you missed it! Gutted. I gave a few talks, played a few songs, made some new friends, gave a lot of hugs, dived into a few ball pits, and took my pants off. Yes, I took my pants off on stage, and yes, I’m still completely teetotal. I’m still not quite sure how I did it.
If, however, you had already heard of VidCon and didn’t need it explained to you, apologies for that last paragraph. Massive respect goes to Hank Green (the main organiser) and all of the team that worked on the conference for managing to pull everything together so well. Sure, there was room for improvement, but seeing as it was Hank’s first go I think he did a brilliant job, and I can’t wait to see how he can build upon it next year … if there is a next year. I’m going to keep my fingers crossed, and I’ll be sure to swoop up the opportunity if he chooses to invite me again.
The most overwhelming thing about the conference though was how many people seemed to know who I was. I did my absolute best to meet as many people as possible when I had spare time to do so, and fortunately everybody that I met was very lovely, friendly, and not creepy in the slightest. There were, however, a few times when I’d head down to the lobby to meet up with a friend for lunch, bump into someone who wanted a photo, and then look behind them a few minutes later to find that a “meet charlieissocoollike!” line had formed all on it’s own. The moments where I had to turn people away so that I could go and get some food were incredibly hard for me to handle, I wanted to give everyone the chance to meet me, but I just didn’t have the time. If you were at VidCon and didn’t get the chance to say hey, I can’t apologize enough :(
Another Thing
As well as VidCon being as thing that has happened, another thing has happened that I want to inform you all about, and that’s FirstTV. I’m extremely lucky to be in the position that I am, I’m thankful for it every day, to live in a world where opportunities get handed to me as often as I do. As a 19 year old without much life direction, when I was approached to audition for a job in traditional presenting I thought “hey, sure, I’ll give it a go”. After all, I wasn’t ever going to know if traditional presenting was the job for me unless I tried it out, so when the producer of FirstTV was kind enough to give me a shot, and a job, I jumped in.
Image from FirstTV
However, it was only after the first day of shooting that I started to feel out of place. Reading from a script didn’t feel right, no matter how much I tried to make it my own, it just wasn’t the show for me … so I decided to quit. Everybody that works on the show is downright lovely, and we all became friends very quickly, which just made my decision to leave all the harder. But hey, when something doesn’t feel right, logically or emotionally, all you can do is use your best judgment.
I don’t regret my decision to join the FirstTV team, albeit very briefly, because without that experience I wouldn’t ever have known that traditional presenting just wasn’t for me. For the FirstTV team of the future, I wish you all the best of luck, and for anyone that’s interested, you’ll be able to find the next four episodes, appearing one by one (all of my stuff has already been shot) on their website: firsttv.tv – I actually break a world record in the first episode, surely it’s worth watching just for that :)
Thanks again to the FirstTV team for the opportunity, to Emma, Nick and Fran for being such lovely ladies and co-presenters, and to you, for your continued support while I try and work out what the hell I want to do with my life. I’ll know at least by the time I reach 30, I promise. <3
First things first: yes, I am very aware of the fact that a gorilla is an ape, not a monkey. I couldn’t find a monkey that would agree to be in the video, so I had to compromise. Still, the gorilla we did get for the video really is both an excellent actor and singer, we were very lucky to find him. He brought in a banoffee pie for the crew on the last day of shooting too. What a swell guy.
Big credit goes to my Mum for the “parody Duet With Myself, sing with a monkey!” idea. It’s not really a parody per-say, but it’s definitely inspired by the duet video, and no doubt you all spotted the oh-so-subtle reference on my T-Shirt. I did try and put together a video for this song ages ago, I wanted another one like Holding On and A Song About Love, something split screen with a bunch of jump cuts, but it just wasn’t working out. This is miles better than what I had before, and much weirder too, which I adore. It’s good to do something a bit odd every now and again.
I actually recorded this song in the studio that I’m recording my album in, I just took some of the instruments out for the purposes of the video, but it’s more or less the album version. An update on my album by the way: I’m expecting to have all of the recording done by the end of the month, then we’ll just need to mix it, and then a month after that it’ll be out! Still no definite release date yet, but one is imminent.
Next stop: LA! Will I be seeing any of you guys at VidCon? :)
Twilight! Oh lord, I do hope I never have to talk about this again. I have to say, after reading what was really just a very short chapter of the book, my respect for Alex has increased tenfold. The guy has read 15 whole chapters of Twilight, and I could hardly even manage one. He’s a hero and I don’t care who knows it.
Yeah, sure, I’m still not really in a position where I have the right to bash Twilight, one chapter is hardly enough to base my opinion of the entire book on. I will say however, that if you do ever decide to read Twilight, be sure to skip chapter 16. It might burn your eyes. By the way, to keep my video under 4 minutes long, I had to cut out a bit where Bella pretended like she wasn’t scared of Edward, and so Edward pounced on her like he was going to bite her head off, just to try and prove that he is, actually, quite scary. That’s true love right there.
As mentioned at the beginning and end of the video, this challenge involves swapping video blogs with Alex! If you’d like to watch a lovely montage of some colourful elephants in London, you’re in luck! Click here to watch his challenge.
After the gross amount of planning, effort and stress that went into making last week’s video, this week I decided to balance things out with a good old fashioned vlog. I sat down, ready to shoot a video about a completely different topic that I had been planning all week, and found myself throwing that idea out of the window in favour of, well, this. A quick, malformed ramble about video games, with no planning at all. My sincerest apologies go out to you all.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is by far my favourite game on the Wii, by the way. Galaxy 1 was brilliant, and definitely my favourite game on the system for the longest time, but Galaxy 2 exceeds it on all fronts: more levels, more refined, more of a challenge (which was a big thing for me, because Galaxy 1 was a bit easy) and overall much more fun. If you only buy one Wii game this year, buy this one -- and I don’t just mean that as a figure of speech, it’s probably the only Wii game I’m going to buy this year.
Speaking of video games, E3! That’s a thing that has happened. Some of you might remember last year’s E3, which I was lucky enough to attend and vlog about using one of my sub channels, CharlieAtE3. I was invited to attend E3 again this year but couldn’t make it unfortunately, the glamorous video blogger lifestyle that I lead ended up getting in the way. Sons Of Admirals, solo album recording, and trips up to London for meetings with exciting prospects, all to be revealed very soon. Really gutted I couldn’t go, I would have loved to have tried out the new Zelda.
Bloody hell, apparently I’m in a rambling mood at the moment. Time to relieve you. Adios!
Well, I’ve definitely been sitting on this one for a while. What you will find in the video above, dear reader, is the first (and currently only) song by my new band, Sons Of Admirals! Which is, as mentioned, the result of Alex Day, Tom Milsom, Eddplant and I all merging to try and make music together, and hopefully create something that we could never have managed as individuals.
I’m really excited to hear what you all think of this, especially the music video, which is my first attempt at doing something that is hopefully a bit more professional than my usual videos. Special thanks go to Tom Bacon, for filming and helping me edit and colour the music video, and to Emma and Gryff for being in the video as our very loveable love interests. All of those people stepped in at the very last minute, for no money. Those are some serious friends <3
To point something out: Sons Of Admirals isn’t really a band in the traditional sense, and this definitely doesn’t mean that any of us are going to be giving up on our solo music, or Chameleon Circuit. Far from it actually, if all goes to plan, we’re hoping to learn each others songs and tour with both SOA and solo material. Also, it’s also not like one of us is the “guitarist” or the “lead singer” or anything, heck, as well as singing on this track I also directed the music video. That’s not the kind of thing you’ll get with a traditional band! We’re something new, and we’re very excited about it :)
Anyway, I hope you like the song! And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
A lot of the stuff that I could mention in regards to my BAFTA experience has already been talked about by my good friend Alex in his post about the night, so instead of simply re-writing his post in my own words, I’m going to try and talk about everything that he didn’t mention. Starting with the stuff that he couldn’t have talked about: the actual presenting an award thing.
I went on stage with the genuinely lovely Joanna Page, who nobody seems to know by her actual name -- It’s only when I say “Stacey, from Gavin and Stacey” that people actually realise who I’m talking about. She was the best, funny, very pretty and just as nervous as I was, if not more so. We spent the time backstage chatting a little, both divulging that we wanted The Inbetweeners to win our award, and going over our lines even though we knew that we were going to have an autocue. The strangest thing was, I wasn’t actually as nervous as I thought I would be.
When you’re backstage, you won’t find a spare minute when someone isn’t coming up to you and asking you how you’re feeling. The rule is, by the way, to say that you’re feeling very nervous, so that they can tell you not to worry or whatever. But I wasn’t that nervous, I was just a bit excited … however, watching the clip back on YouTube, I can gather now you may have perceived me as someone who was ready to poo in their pants. My voice wavers, my hands shake -- now that it’s over, people have no problem telling me that “you looked great!” because hey, it’s happened now so it doesn’t matter how I did. Either those people are lying or misremembering the event. I definitely looked nervous, but I didn’t FEEL nervous.
Then came the BAFTA after-party (the Bafter-party lol) which Alex has already talked about and who’s feelings I share about the whole thing. It was lovely. Then, after the Bafter-party (try saying that ten times fast) came a goodie bag! The people at BAFTA are just too kind. The highlight of the selection of gifts was definitely this thing:
A "Bed of Nails" what
Click on that picture and you’ll see that every little white thing is covered in spikes. Yes, you’re supposed to lie on this. Notice the wording on their website: “the pressure of the rounded nails against the skin may help the body release endorphins” -- but you can’t sue us if it doesn’t work. The nails aren’t rounded either, they’re very spiky … Alex laid his back on this thing and, guess what? It hurt! Funny that LYING ON A BED OF NAILS WOULD HURT YOUR BACK. Needless to say, it’s now in the bin. It brought me and Alex lots of lulz when it was in our lives though, so I guess it really did release endorphins in that respect.
Finally: I was reading the amazing stream of messages that you guys were sending me after I was up on stage. Your support during this was incredible, a brilliant reminder of how dedicated internet communities really are. You guys are the best, seriously, thank you! :3
First balloon animals, now this … does anyone have a unicycle for sale? If the YouTube thing doesn’t work out, I can always go into clowning.
It was actually really fun to get back into doing a daily video project again, even though it was more “daily” than daily. It probably would have been boring for you to see a video of every day, I think every other day makes it easier for you to notice a significant improvement each time … that’s what I’m going to go with anyway. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was getting so into the juggling that, sometimes, I just forgot to film anything. Nothing to do with that all.
If I can learn to juggle in just over a week, I’m sure that you could manage it too, so if you think that it looks quite fin then I’d recommend it :) For me, as someone who never really gets out the house, it’s been good exercise for my arms. Lord I’m unfit. Anyway.
Before I head off I just wanted to say, thanks a bunch to everyone that pre-ordered a T-Shirt! Now that we have all of the orders, we’ll print one for each of you and ship them on their way to you as soon as they’re done. Just to implicitly state how brilliant you all are: you’ve made this shirt the best selling T-Shirt that DFTBA has ever produced! Which is a very humbling statistic really, thank you so much for your support everyone ^_^
Actually, you know what? Contrary to what I mentioned in this video, you definitely can be a Doctor Who fan without having tried Fish Custard. I do these things so that you don’t have to … though, you want to be a hardcore Who fan? You probably should give it a go. And, if you want to consider yourself more whovian than The Doctor himself, maybe try and make fish custard a regular addition in your diet. Though I wouldn’t recommended that last suggestion very strongly.
It's a T-Shirt! yay
So! As mentioned in the video, I have created a new T-Shirt. Listening to all of your suggestions from last time, I put much more effort into drawing this one, and I’ve provided you with an actual photo/video footage of the thing so that you can see what it’ll really look like. Plus, ladies sizes! This was a very frequent suggestion last time, so I’m really happy to provide you lovely women with shirts which will actually fit you. I know my friend Alex will be very happy about this -- he’s a very skinny man, a ladies XS is a perfect fit for him.
T-shirts are no longer available, sorry!
I have to be honest though, in fact you probably noticed from my tone near the end of the video … I don’t like selling stuff, and I really hope you’ll understand that I’m not doing this simply to grab a quick buck from you all. YouTube is my job, sure, but I have genuinely always loved art and design, I’ve wanted to try my hand at this since I was a kid, and to be given the opportunity to make things that I’m really proud of is an absolute luxury for me -- I love it to pieces.
I hope you all can appreciate that, I’m not here to try and shove T-Shirts down your throats. For those that have expressed an interest in me making these, I hope you’ll like them, and for everyone else: my videos are a free gift to you all as far as I’m concerned. If you’re not interested in getting a shirt, supporting me so that I can keep making the videos, that’s fine, I don’t mind in the slightest :)
Every time I think that I’m starting to settle into something which vaguely resembles a normal life, some massively surreal opportunity comes to bite me on the bum. But it’s an exciting bite on the bum (if there is such a thing). I’m here today to reveal unto you all that I, Charlie McDonnell, that guy who makes videos on the internet, will be going to the Television BAFTA’s. To present an award. So I’m going to be on the television. Presenting a BAFTA. I don’t get how this is allowed.
I mean, surely I’m going to get on stage only to have everyone shout “he’s not a celebrity, what’s he doing up there? Kill him!” and then Graham Norton is going to pull out a crossbow and shoot me in the head. And then they’ll drag me off screen like the fraud that I am, with a snail-trail of blood in my wake. And then I’ll get blood on my new suit! Which will definitely be the worst thing about that hypothetical situation.
Wow, sorry for being so grim. Let’s forget about the blood. BAFTA! This year, YouTube are Sponsoring the Audience Award (the only award voted for by the public) and the lovely Jamie at YouTube sent me an email asking if I wanted to present it. Voting is taking place here if you’re interested, and the show is taking place on the 6th of June. Hopefully they’ll let me shoot some footage while I’m over there, I reckon the experience would make a fun video :)
I have nothing more to say than that, just wanted to share my excitement with you! Also, I’m probably going to have nightmares about a crossbow wielding Graham Norton tonight.
