patrickhwillems

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND

Last week the channel hit 100,000 subscribers. It took us 5 and a half years to get to 18,000, and then just 7 months to gain an additional 82,000.

This is wild.

I honestly never expected the channel to get anywhere near this number. I'm genuinely so astounded and moved by it that I felt it deserved a video to commemorate it. And also this past week was insane for several other reasons so there definitely was not enough time to make a video essay.

The road to this point over the pa...

Patrick Explains BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM (And Why It's Great)

As I mentioned back in April when I made the Fast & Furious video, I liked the format a lot and thought it had potential to become a recurring thing. And now it has officially recurred!

While these are more videos where I talk enthusiastically about movies, what separates them from the video essays (aside from the visual presentation) is that these don't really have a thesis beyond "I love this thing." So I think these benefit from the framing device and actually having me on camera talkin...

GET OUT recut comedy trailer

This one is a little different.

(also: SPOILER WARNING in case you haven't seen Get Out yet)

A couple months ago my friend Anna sent me a link to an interview with Jordan Peele where he mentioned that he would love to see someone make a recut trailer that makes Get Out look like a comedy.

So I figured I'd give it a shot. The movie came out on blu-ray yesterday, so I picked up a copy, ripped it so I would have a movie file to edit,...

Adam McKay: What is Smart Dumb Comedy?

Wow, this is the third video essay in four weeks. I don't know how some channels do it every single week. I'm both exhausted from all the repetitive editing and antsy to get outside and shoot some narrative stuff again. Like, I've got a gig doing a college commencement video this weekend ( Oprah will be in it!) and I'm actually exciting just because I want to move with the camera again.

Which is not to say I'm not enjoying these. I totally am. But this is definitely reinforcing my general plan...

How to Get Into Comic Books

This is the most important video I'll probably make all year.

Over the past fifteen or so years, as comics have become more accepted by the mainstream, countless people I know have asked me to help them delve into the medium. Because it's tough! There are a million things out there and it's intimidating, plus the comic industry is TERRIBLE at marketing and reaching people who aren't already active comic book readers.

Since I love comics and want to help as many people as possible enjoy t...

The Matrix: How to Begin a Movie (video essay)

I made another one.

I mentioned at the end of the previous video that I was considering doing another video essay on The Matrix. The response and demand ended up being far greater than I expected (like, almost every comment on the video is a demand for another one), so I figured I'd just keep the momentum going and and do it immediately.

This one is a detailed breakdown of the opening scene and what makes it so effective. It gets really detailed and nerdy, and I...

Sheflok & Waffson III (the last of the big old movies)

People asked for it, so here it is: the feature-length film I made in 2007 as a college freshman...

Sheflok & Waffson III

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_lHPn30w1R4Y3JFdjNQYkljNlk

Disclaimer: when we premiered this movie and I watched it for the first time I was kind of horrified by some unintended subtext in there. The script we used was a frantically-written first draft w...

Sheflok & Waffson II (more old movies)

As promised, last week I released a bunch of the movies I made in high school for patrons to see. And I also made a video about them.

If you watched the video, you know there was a whole trilogy I made from 2005-2007. I released the first installment last week, so in case anyone is curious, here's the second one: Sheflok & Waffson II (a feature length film!)

https://driv...

The Matrix: A Lesson in Effective Scene Transitions

Of all the movies I've seen in my life, I've seen The Matrix the most. It's the movie that made me want to become a filmmaker. So it was inevitable that I would make a video essay about it.

As I mention in the outro, I actually had another topic related to the movie that I almost made this video about, and still might. Seriously, if you want more, let me know. I could talk about this movie forever.

As always, your support and patronage is hugely appreciated. This is the 26th con...

Sheflok & Waffson: The Movie

(Due to copyright issues with music this is blocked in some countries. Let me know if you have an issue with this and I'll find a solution)

This was my big movie from 2005, and the start of a trilogy I spent the end of high school and the beginning of college making. It is very much a perfect representation of what I thought was funny and/or cool in 11th grade, expressed through my not particularly strong filmmaking abilities.

Pretty much all the background to this movie is covered in th...

Patrick Willems: Aspiring Lumberjack

Okay, here it is. My first movie. Made in the summer of 2004 with my friend Nick Mark.

The sound is terrible. My acting is terrible. The soundtrack is pretty great.

And here's the ridiculous teaser trailer set to "Duel of the Fates" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKUHSDiZ3zM

And the longer trailer, which is equally ridiculous 

2017-04-19 21:07:30 +0000 UTC View Post

My Old Movies

I mentioned last week that since we crossed the $250/month goal on the Patreon, I would be putting a bunch of my old movies online for patrons to see. Expect a patron-only post about those in a moment. But for now, since I had to go find all those old movies anyway, I figured it would be a good excuse to do a whole video about them (and give all the non-patrons a glimpse).

This video basically recaps my whole filmmaking experience from 2004-2007 and all the crazy movies I made with some of the...

What if John Woo Directed Squirrel Girl?

I've had this concept since last November. We've been working on it for the past couple months. I'm really excited about this one.

Obviously, it's the latest video in the "Alternate Universe Comic Book Movies" series, and this might be the silliest one. Also maybe my favorite. But that could be because I've had it on my mind nonstop for months.

If you haven't read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, you really should. It's probably my favorite Marvel ...

WE REACHED A GOAL

Hello patrons! A quick update: last night we crossed one of the goals for the Patreon: $250/month.

So what does that mean? It means that soon I'll be putting a bunch of the movies I made back in high school online but ONLY FOR YOU PATRONS TO SEE.

This may take a week or two since I no longer seem to own a copy of my first movie, "Patrick Willems: Aspiring Lumberjack." But since I made a bunch of DVDs of it back in the day and gave them out to friends, I just have to trac...

Patrick Explains the Fast and the Furious (and Why It's Great)

Last summer when I mentioned to Jake that I was thinking of doing weekly videos again and doing some less narrative stuff like video essays, he immediately replied, "You should do a video for your Fast & Furious monologue."

Some background: since 2011 I have become something of a Fast & Furious evangelist. I really love these movies, and whenever someone tells me they've never seen them, I tend to launch into a speech about why they should.

That speech is pretty much exactly what...

Steven Spielberg & the Horror Inside Blockbusters

Hey kids! It's a new video essay!

Anyone who knows me at all knew I was eventually going to get around to talking about Spielberg in one of these. If I'm being honest, this probably won't be the last time. 

Last Thanksgiving my sister and I ended up getting sucked into a marathon of all the Jurassic Park movies playing on, I believe, Spike. I had just made my first video essay, and while watching the T-Rex attack for the millionth time, I realized I wanted to find a way to do a vide...

Meet the Team

This one is WAY overdue. As in, I should have made it three years ago.

An issue I've been aware of on the channel for a long time is that while there are a bunch of recurring cast members, the audience doesn't really know who they are, since they only appear playing characters performing scripted dialogue. But until last November, the videos were ALL narrative and released sporadically so there didn't seem to be a good opportunity to give the core video team a proper introduction.

Then o...

Nook Commercial

So after a couple weeks of videos about filmmaking, here's something very different. Actually this is way more like the kind of thing we used to make all the time, in that it's weird and colorful and exists only because we thought it was funny.

The super dull backstory: last fall my sister gave me the Nook she got from her old job (in publishing) and never used. I thought the idea of an X-TREME late-90s-style commercial for the Nook was really funny. For some reason, way funnier than for a Kin...

How to Make a Good Fantastic Four Movie

Sorry this is a day late. I sat down to edit a couple days ago and then had the thought: "Let's add a ton of animation to it!" and suddenly editing took twice as long.

Anyway, this is a very, very nerdy video about comic book movies, specifically my frustration with the continued mishandling of the Fantastic Four through several terrible movies.

I thought about making this back in August 2015 after the last FF movie was released, but back then I wasn't making anything like vlogs or video...

WE WROTE A SCREENPLAY IN 3 DAYS

This is pretty self-explanatory. But I'll give some explanation anyway!

Jake and I have been working on a horror movie screenplay for the past year. We had the whole thing mapped out and outlined, but were having trouble finding time to start the actual writing of the script, since there are always so many short video scripts that required our attention.

So to get this done, we locked ourselves in an apartment (belonging to Jake's grandparents) this past weekend and attempted to write an...

Spooky House

This is  day late due to my severely underestimating the amount of work it would require. I'm really trying to stick to the Wednesday upload schedule, so hopefully as we go on I'll get better at planning the production timeline.

So this is a new narrative short that I will be the first to admit is like 30-60 seconds too long. It was originally planned a bit more to specificaly be about overused jump scare setups in horror movies, which I realized while editing is easier said than done. I ...

David Fincher & the Craft of Music Videos

A new video essay!

I don't know how some YouTubers make one of these every week, because it is a  crazy amount of work.

What I'm doing with the video essays is going through the long list of stuff I'm really nerdy about. Like, the things I go on lengthy monologues to my friends about. Despite the Marvel and DC ones obviously being hot button topics, these are usually not going to be like that. My priority is that the essays cover things I care a lot about. The goal is to communicate...

How We Make These Videos

Since we started doing weekly videos back in November, one of my goals was to make more content that gives a peak  behind the curtain, so viewers can get to know the cast and crew better and see what our process is like. This is...kind of like that.

Basically, on the big list of video ideas I sent over to the team, I had one that would explain our creative process. So Matt immediately jumped on that and wrote the script for this video. Obviously it's not really an accurate representation ...

How to Become a Filmmaker (Or At Least How I Did It)

Well, guys, here it is: a full-on VLOG.

I had been noticing over the past couple months (especially with the Q&A video) how many aspiring filmmakers seemed to be watching, and how much people seemed to be interested in more talk about the process of filmmaking. I used to be totally opposed to ever doing anything like vlogging, but I've come around on it in the past year, and I've found a way to do it that I like.

So going foward, there's going to be a vlog along these lines every mon...

What if Alejandro G. Iñárritu Directed Wolverine?

WE MADE ANOTHER ALTERNATE UNIVERSE COMIC BOOK MOVIE

It's been a while. I love this series. They're some of the hardest videos to make that we do, but when we nail it (and I think we did here), it's so, so satisfying.

This one has been on the list for about a year, but I figured we wouldn't get to do it for a while, since it required two things to do it right: 1. a high dynamic range camera, and 2. a gymbal stabilizer to pull off those smooth tracking shots from BIRDMAN and THE REVENANT.<...

DC Film's Character Problem

A new video essay! And it's really, really long!

I realize it might seem pretty soon after the Marvel color grading video to be talking about comic book movies again, but after how heated the comments section on that one got with all the DC vs Marvel debates breaking out, I wanted to balance things out a bit. And after this, I don't plan on doing another video essay about comic book movies for quite some time.

I was planning on releasing this in December, but pushed it back because I rea...

We're Doing a Contest

This isn't an official regular video but I felt like it deserved a quick post here anyway.

We hit 50,000 subscribers last week. That's nuts. Especially considering that two months ago we were at 18,000.

So we're doing a contest. And so far the submissions are amazing. You can watch the video for all the deets.

Introducing the Ultimate Badasses

Here's the new video! It's a big showcase for the DJI Ronin-M gymbal stabilizer that I got with the funding from YouTube NextUp. So if you were thinking, "When did he suddenly get a steadicam," this is why.

The background for this one is that I, like many of us, have grown immensely tired of the overuse of certain songs in movies and TV. Particularly "Sympathy for the Devil," which has become a spectaculaly lazy way to signal to the audience "Hey, this character is a badass who doesn't play by...

2017

Here we go, the first video of 2017, and it's about...2017. And also 2016. It's kind of an experimental vlog where I reflect back on the past year and look ahead to the new one. Also, my mom makes a cameo. My mom is the best.

I originally had an additional section in there where I talked about my own experience with 2016, but I cut it for pacing reasons.

Basically, I felt like I spent most of 2016 coasting, waiting for pojects to sell (that have yet to sell), and not woking as hard as I ...

A Super Long Q&A Video

If you're currently snowed in like I am, that's the perfect time to curl up by the fire and watch  a 30-minute-long video in which I answer 32 questions submitted by viewers. My wonderful sister, Mary, joined me and served as a sort of modertor.

There isn't much else to say about this. I hope everyone had a super great Christmas (or just a super great time if you don't happen to celebrate Christmas). We're hard at work on new videos for the new year. Since a lot of the team is back in our...