It’s the first anniversary of my very first KZread video! I want to thank everyone for watching and having fun on here! This is the unreleased video I planned to start the channel with, using a lot of the ideas I had that lead to the creation of the channel in the first place, but ended up never getting posted. The canal experience, showing the John G Munson’s arrival.
Since I never really say anything about myself or the channel at all, here’s a little bit of background! For years now I’ve videoed and photographed almost every ship I see, mostly for myself to watch later. The idea to post some of those started after I had people asking me to see the ships and storms that I saw at the canal and around town. I’d send video clips via text, but I couldn’t send a long enough video to really capture much with that method. Plus I’d gotten to know many of the people who chat on Duluth Harbor Cam, and wanted to show them what it was like to actually be at the canal, rather than looking from a wide angle webcam. The other videos posted online were great, but to me they didn’t quite capture the atmosphere properly, the feeling of actually being at the canal, watching a floating skyscraper sail past and that frustrated me a bit. So I needed a better way of sending videos to people, and if anyone else wanted to watch along, bonus! Hopefully they’d enjoy as well. It was a little uncomfortable to even mention the channel for a long time because I’ve always hated social media, the feeling that it sort of eventuality becomes more of a vanity channel about the person behind the camera instead of the the actual content of the video. Even some videos that don’t do that are so hyped and overblown that it’s impossible to tell what’s real. But I got to meet some of the canal KZreadrs and for the most part they avoided that trap, so I decided I’d give it a shot and that I’d be able to film it as myself without falling into a pit. So after playing around with my phone a bit and learning how to string footage together and post it, I went down to the canal and caught the John G Munson arriving, from the perspective of the everyday tourist, trying to capture as much of the experience as I possibly could.
The resulting video was much longer than I was comfortable posting as a first attempt, but I also didn’t want to ruin it by chopping it up and posting an edited version. So an hour later I filmed a second video, this time the Paul R Tregurtha departing, taken from an angle that not only showed off the ship’s scale, but also limited the view time to a more comfortable level. I posted it as a test run, hoping for 10 views over the next few weeks if I was lucky, and maybe a comment giving enough feedback that I could try and judge if I needed to improve anything. The video did better than anticipated, 48 views that first day, so I filmed several more in different styles and in different locations just to try and play around, experimenting. I released a total of 6 videos over a few weeks. In early June the school year ended and my school bus driving job with it for a few months. I left town for a temporary summer job that kept me extremely busy and often away from Duluth for the next two months. My KZread experiment was almost forgotten. The last week of July, that job finished up and I returned home. During this period of time, the original video with many of the concepts and ideas I wanted to start the channel with got butied and forgotten.
With little to do for a whole month before school resumed, I looked back at my videos and discovered that one, a James R Barker video, had somehow hit 30,000 views, and more importantly a few people enjoyed it. So I started filming again on a more regular basis, hoping to that the people who watched had as much fun as I was seeing the ships, plus sharing their histories and doing some research into them to make sure I got as much correct as possible, learning as I went.
So my original goal for 10 views on one or two videos, and that at least one person would enjoy it has somehow exploded. As of me writing this the channel has 180 videos posted in a few different formats. 2,745 subscribers (somehow, never anticipated anyone subscribing but I’m glad you enjoy the videos that much!) and the most insane part being 1,951,804 views. Or equivalent to about 1/3 the entire population of Minnesota. Or it would also be the 5th largest city in the United States. Granted a percentage is repeat viewers but that just makes it even more special, and I don’t know how to thank everyone. That’s absolutely mind blowing, considering I’m mostly just walking out onto a pier with a cell phone, doing what I’d be doing every day anyway😂.
I’ll keep working on improving the videos as well! (The biggest pain has always been titles, especially because I’m a slight perfectionist lol) will keep on going!
Thank you, everyone. And I hope you all have been enjoying the videos and the history as much as I have been.