Dan Mace
Creating For YouTube

I feel like I fell into filmmaking by mistake. I was about 16 years old and I had to do an oral presentation in front of the class on the topic 'defending the indefensible.' I knew it would have to be about a five-minute presentation and I couldn't do that - I had such bad social anxiety. I still do. I thought, "I've got to come up with another way to be able to present to people without actually having to present to them." So I said to my teacher, "Do you think I would be able to use that old TV, then I could film something, film myself and then present it to the class." And she said, "Well, don't film yourself talking. If you can make a video presentation, that'll be cool."

After Cannes happened, I was able to do my first big TV ad. That ad did really well and after that, my career just started moving upwards as a director. 

Still, to this day, there are a lot of people that go, why on earth did you do that? At the time that I was working on my career as a film director, I wasn't too focused on YouTube really. It was just something that I dabbled in and I watched a little bit of YouTube content, and I'd made this video about four or five years prior.

Casey is the craziest person. He is insane. He has drive like nobody else that I've ever experienced. And he can switch over to doing family time and do that for like two hours, then it'll be back to work for seven hours and then it will be a run for two hours. I was convinced for the first two months that he was an AI. I actually put out a tweet asking people and 50% of people were like, "We think the same - AI." As I said, it's a blessing - and I love Casey to bits and it's amazing having a mentor like that - but it's also a bit of a curse because he is so incredible.

I think the first problem is comparison. It's the first big thing for any content creator. What happens is, with content creation, everything gets piled into one. So you don't actually follow one person, you're following like 20 people uploading maybe once a week. But what looks like every single day, because you've seen something great every single day, you lose track of who's posting what so it seems as if lots of people are posting a lot more every single day.

YouTube for me isn't the end goal. I want to make Gangster dank feature films - that's my goal.

So I kept ideas big, but I made the execution out of stuff that I could gain access to and my surroundings. Maybe what happens in other areas, is it's flipped - where people take a small idea and then they add a lot of production value to it and make it look really good.

There's a quote, "Often opportunity is missed as it's disguised in overalls and looks like work," by Thomas Edison. I used to film the TEDx videos when I was much younger, like 20 years old, and I read that as a quote that was underneath one of the things, I think it was at Prince Albert. That piece of advice or that quote, which I took as advice, was going to change my life.

Some people call it creative block, other people call it writer's block and others call it depression. It happens to everybody and it happens to me all the time. Creating stuff is a difficult thing to do. Creating is arguably far harder than any other job, really having to put yourself out there and create something from your head. The only way you're really going to be able to extract that is by applying pressure, if you are really stuck, and what happens is like a snowball effect. You've just got to start. So if you go and you press record on a camera and it's in the room and it's staring at you with its eye and you've got to speak to it, you will start speaking to it. 

The most important thing is the story - what you have to say. And beyond that, it's how you choose to say it. The camera should be the third or fourth thing that you even start to think about.