blake carlile

Whew, what a ride this contest has been. I posted the video on December 19. Pretty early on, it was featured on smule's contest site as an "early favorite". Around the turn of the year, it was still featured on the site and the vid's number of viewers still had a pretty good momentum going. But then, like all good things, that came to an end. Shortly after the new year, my video was removed from the early favorites list and the viewership fell.

I was still optimistic, but not getting my hopes up too much because I had a lot of good competition, and however I could personally promote my video paled in comparison to smule doing it for me. So I wrote a few shameless plugs in tweets, but otherwise just crossed my fingers.

I watched on January 12 when then announced the winners on a live internet broadcast. I recorded myself and my reaction because, well have you ever heard of The Secret :) -- if you imagine something will happen, it will? My reasoning was something like that. Unfortunately I wasn't able to capture my initial reaction to winning since it was after 2 in the morning when I finally found out. I was groggy and incredulous, and only truly believed it once I saw myself on the smule contest site.

They included this write-up of my video: A guy in need of a REAL Smule T-Shirt who can't pronounce the name of our company, yet still manages to craft a charming and endearing rendition of a classic tune. When I was emailing them after I won to hammer out the logistics, I apologized for the mispronunciation. They were nice and said they got a kick out of it, along with the homemade t-shirt. As you can see above, they gave me an upgraded Smule t-shirt along with my winnings.

I'm really thankful to smule. They were nice enough to let me know the contest was going on in the first place. Then they kept me as an "early favorite" for an extended period of time and were always cordial and personal in emails - which is more than I can say for other companies' correspondence, no matter how big or small. And of course I'm thankful to everyone who supported me, linked to the video, rated or commented.

An increase in embeds	Big in the Netherlands!
About 500 views in a day for the Whistle Stop video.	All video total in one day: around 650

Since then, the video has taken off. It was once again back on the smule site showcasing all the winners. Smule must have also put out a press release because a few other sites have picked up the story and posted it themselves. I checked out my youtube Insight page and saw that the Embedded Player count was really high, which immediately struck me since the smule site doesn't embed, they just link with a picture.

Digging further into the Embedded Player report, it appears a couple sites went down the list and embedded all 10 winners:

• iphoneclub.nl. Yep, I'm a hit in the Netherlands! I used Google Translate to see there was any more reporting about my video in the introduction or comments, but there weren't any. Oddly enough, Babelfish doesnt offer the translation from Dutch to English.
• pocketgamer.co.uk. Looks like I've also being shown in the UK on this British tech site. By the way, I couldn't find a search function on this site to save my life, had to page through all news stories to find the smule article.
• cultofmac.com. This one didn't have as many embed hits as the other ones, but it did a quip about my video: “Whistle Stop” - Guitar, Ocarina, harmonica, kazoo, ukelele + barbershop harmony. Alas, no accordion.
• techchee.com. Even less embed hits, but a pretty spiffy-looking tech site.

All total, winning the contest made the views on my video skyrocket. As you can see in the snapshots, I got about 500 views in one day! (almost 200 from the Netherlands alone!) This blows my previous one day high out of the water - iPhone 3g purchase a BUST! - which had 252 views in one day.

Okay, on to some business. I've received numerous requests through youtube for the music for ukelele, harmonica and smule ocarina, so here they are:

Harmonica: G harp, normal number is blow, underlined is draw (suck in):

(G) 8 8 8 7 7 6 6 6
(G) 8 8 8 7 7 7 (D) 8
8 8 (G) 8 7 7 7 (C) 9 9 7
6 (G) 6 7 (D) 8 8 (G) 7

Ukelele: G-C-E-A tuning:

   G                             D
A|-2-0-2-------------2-0-2-------0------
E|-------3-3---0-----------3-2-3--------
C|-----------2---2----------------------
G|--------------------------------------

       G       C       G   D   G       
A|-2-0-2-------5-3---------0-2----------
E|-------3-2-3-----3-0---3-----3--------
C|---------------------2----------------
G|--------------------------------------

Smule ocarina: The Smule folks did it right by starting up a community and making a handy tool for easily generating a score with ocarina diagrams. I wrote out the score and added it to the forum. I recommend checking out the forums, lots of songs have been written out.

Let me know if you have any additional questions about the music. Thanks again to everyone. And if this is your first time at intothemantle.com, stick around! We're fan-focused and practicing delvers :)

I just uploaded my 20th youtube video (it was actually this one, but I'm a bit more proud of the video above, #19). The stats:

• # of videos: 20
  • # music videos: 8
  • # video responses: 1
• # total views (8/13): 5,982
• max # views on one video: 2,568 (Princess Bride Theme on piano)
  • Princess Bride's % of total views: 43%
• min # views on one video: 20 (Smashing Saltines)
• # total comments: 20
• max # comments on one video: 6 (Princess Bride Theme on piano)
• # video comments: 2 (thanks to Darius)
• most views on first day: 252 (iPhone 3g purchase a BUST!)
• # 5 star rated videos: 7
• min rating: 2.0 (Duck Tales theme on guitar)
• # videos with no rating: 9
• avg rating of rated videos: 4.36
• longest running time: 9:52 (Dark Knight Shooting Locations in Chicago Tour)
• shortest running time: 1:18 (Duck Tales theme on guitar)
• most ambitious: Dark Knight Shooting Locations in Chicago Tour
• most prolific month: July (7 videos)
• most prolific calendar week: 7/27-8/2 (4 videos)
• razzie winner: Cleaning up styrofoam (but that was expected :))
• separately: Darius videos that involve me: 9

Other thoughts: Like any other endeavor where you start from scratch, you start with an idea in your head of the direction you'd like to go and proceed. You have to allow for some space for growth and change. Every once in a while, you stop and reflect and check in on how things are going. In this post, I wrote about my first youtube upload, just over four months ago. At the time, my main goal was to chronicle my progress relearning the piano now that I have the Yamaha YDP223 here. Obviously, I expanded a bit since then, mostly because a) I had some fun with it b) I got inspired by Darius' videos, along with others once I started watching videos with a creator's eye c) I got more accustomed to using youtube as a means of expression.

Present goals: I still want to utilize youtube as a means of building piano skills. Also, I want to keep using it to keep up my guitar/harmony/mixing chops. I liked experimenting with editing (new territory for me), so I would like keep up ambition there. Eventually I may upgrade software - I am currently using Windows Media Maker which takes care of the basics, but could soon become restrictive. I'd like to further myself in the youtube community.
   One stray thought I had with the Charlotte's Web video: There are some songs out there that don't have enough presence and/or don't have a definitive version to them. Mine is currently the only version of that song on youtube (besides in the Brady Bunch Megamix). So I may try to highlight hidden gems (as others do well). And odds are, with that as my new goal, that could expand to areas outside of long-forgotten songs.

Conclusion: the shortest video gets the lowest rating? I guess the people just want to see more :)