Introducing A New Silent Film YouTube Channel

You may have noticed over the last few months I’ve been posting less on my blog; however, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. In fact, I’ve been putting more work than usual into my hobby of classic movies than usual!

I’ve been focusing a lot of time working on my silent film YouTube channel. Reading up on a topic, writing a script, recording narration, editing said audio file, and editing videos and images together, and mastering a final version to upload to YouTube is quite a gargantuan task. Not to mention writing social media posts for promotion and creating the occasional TikToks and YouTube shorts I also make along the way!

My YouTube channel‘s home page with my four already posted video essays

My YouTube channel is an extension of my blog, an exploration of early and silent cinema. In the past six months, I’ve done video essays on The Birth of a Nation’s complicated legacy, the history of early color film before The Wizard of Oz, and lost silent films, and what we can learn from them. You can watch my Birth of a Nation and Early Color Film videos now, with my Lost Silent Film video coming out the first week of May.

I’ve found that videos and writing each have their strengths and their drawbacks. My video essays give me a chance to cover a wider range than in a single blog post (my newest video essay is over half an hour), but my writing always allows me to dive in deeper, delving into more minute details with plenty of links to other resources just one click away. Video also has the advantage in today’s algorithmic world to push out my work to a larger audience, giving me an audience in the thousands when my typical blog post is lucky to break triple-digit views.

I simultaneously wrote my blog post and YouTube script on The Birth of a Nation‘s inflated status as cinema’s first masterpiece.

Now that I have a few videos under my belt, I’ve gotten a more solid workflow, not having to look up every little thing about Audacity’s audio settings or DaVinci Resolve’s editing shortcuts. So I’m looking now to improve beyond just getting a video done, with one area of improvement being integrating my writing more with my videos and vice versa.

For example, in my upcoming video on Lost Silent Film, I drew from one of my favorite blog posts from a couple of years ago, where I dug through movie magazines to find out more about two 1916 Romeo and Juliet adaptations released at the same time. Borrowing from my previous work not only allowed me to save time in the research process, but also provided an opportunity to potentially bring a larger audience to my writing.

Alongside my old blog post, my video shares the photos I sourced from the archives in Beverly Bayne’s personal papers.

This integration works both ways. I’ll be posting detailed show notes here on my blog alongside each long-form YouTube video I release, listing in-depth all the sources I’ve used in the research and writing process, as well as the clips and images I use in the video. Showing each source throughout an already long video essay slows down the flow of the narrative and often bores the viewers. Leaving a path for people to retrace my steps and even come to different conclusions using the primary sources is really important to me, and my blog is the perfect way to house that paper trail without alienating the casual YouTuber viewer not versed in classic film history or primary source research.

So check out my YouTube channel (@SilentShawn95) and stay tuned for more posts that align with my YouTube videos. All my hard work is starting to pay off. (Literally, I got monetized on YouTube earlier this year!) I’m really excited about the opportunity that lies ahead to further spread my love of classic and silent cinema to both dedicated fans and the casual observer through both my blog and YouTube channel.