My name is LJ van der Put, I'm 21 years old and I currently live in Dordrecht, The Netherlands. In my High School years I didn't do much studying, games where more fun so that's what I did most of the time. During my exams I managed to finish 3 games and yet still pased my exams. I never felt the urge to get top marks in High School since all we learned was stuff which didn't really matter to me. Videogames, those mattered!
Don't worry! I still went outdoors. I've been playing soccer since I was 6 years old, although, I did quit this year. Lets get back to our story. Since pretty much all I did was playing video games I started not to just play games, I also watched other people playing videogames! After spending hours and hours behind my computer and xbox I decided it was about time I started to post my own gameplays on YouTube as well! I saw pretty cool montages back in the days and so, that's what I tried to create as well. After struggling to get my editing skills on a decent level I discoverd that searching for the right music was also a big issue. After doing some research I found out that a lot of people where struggling with this issue as well. Since I didn't had the proper editing skills which I needed to create decent content yet, I thought: 'If so many people are struggling to find music for their own videos, why not create videos where I post songs which would be great to use for their own videos'. At that point I started to create videos which contained five songs. According to me all these five songs would be great to use in a video! After uploading a few of these 'top 5 montage songs' videos I got such nice feedback that I kept the series going. After 150 videos I decided to quit the series and start uploading daily. This gave me the oppurtunity to upload more genres within one week, plus YouTube became more aware of copyright, so now if one of the songs got a copyright claim I didn't have to remove the audio of that particulair song, I could now just delete the video in stead. Removing the audio out of my videos was necessary to avoid copyright strikes. What it also did was confusing a lot of people since there where parts in the video without any sound at all. That's mainly why I decided to start uploading daily and nowadays I still am!
Uploading daily also got me more motivated since I now have the chance to use my own photographs in my videos. Back in the days I always used the same pictures and after a while I got more and more requests to start using other pictures. Of course some people prefer to see pictures of nearly naked women and I would say there is nothing wrong with that, although I would like to make the music I post the reason why people would click on the video in stead of the women.
Next to playing videogames, photography and YouTube comes film! After wasting two years of my life in picking the wrong studies I figured it was about time I started to pick a study of which I did like. I started at 'Het Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam' and picked the study Audiovisual Productions which is basically a combination of film and photography. After the first year you can decide to either continue with photography or film. I did find it quit difficult to pick one since I love both, but I already did party photography as a parttime job so I figured film was the right choice for me. Nowadays I'm still learning to become a proffessional cameraman/editor and I'm also learning tons of other stuff like lighting, producing, directing, writing scenarios and a lot more!
Thank you for your time