A Year of Micro-Videos Taught Me a Lot About Myself

At the beginning of last year, I committed myself to getting creative on the regular, writing at least once a week, and updating my blog often. Then I didn’t do any of that because, as we all know, the moment you publicly air plans to be productive in any way, you are sealing your fate to not at all do that exact thing. So this year I commit to nothing and we’ll see how it goes. This website is still here and will remain so and I can come back to it whenever I want.

However, I actually did end up adhering to part of that commitment. Specifically, I did end up flexing creative muscle through a lot of last year but in a different medium: That of the short form micro-video!

TikTok! You know TikTok. That supposed spyware phone app that’s actually just a “new” (not “new” really, not new at all, but new to a lot of people) form of social media that’s popular with younger people. That TikTok! Well, I started one. Actually, if I’m honest about it, I started it earlier than most people with a personal account that I was using back in 2018. That’s a fun party trick, one of my friend’s teenagers will be like “do you even know what TikTok is?” and then I’ll be like “I bet I had a TikTok account before you did’” and I always win.

Anyway, last year Monster Hunter Rise came out and, as a huge Monster Hunter fan, I of course was playing the heck out of it. And I just randomly got this idea like… what if I tried out this whole “content creation” thing (aside: I hate the term “content creator”) but instead of floudering on YouTube I just tried TikTok? So I made a couple videos and threw them up on my personal TikTok and actually, they did okay! I even got a video editing app and started editing them a bit to be more interesting and better made. And they got some hits! But… I didn’t really want them on my personal channel and thought that I might be better off having a dedicated channel for them.

So my TikTok account @dualblader was born!

My first video was just a quick intro video that did a few hundred views and I felt like, huh, some people actually watched this and liked it.

To make this video, I used a single video off my Nintendo Switch. I put my Monster Hunter character into a fun outfit and did something cool and then just introduced myself. It seemed to work! And making it was fun! And then I made a second video that wasn’t that popular and whatever, it was fine… it felt like I was making something people would be into even if it was just a few people and that I was enjoying.

Then I made my third video and, as of today, it has… over 180k views!

My first hit video

My inspiration for this video was to make something quick and informative that people might find cute and interesting. The subject is the Monksnail, a huge monster in Monster Hunter Rise that you can find only at certain times. This video shows people where it is, how to interact with it, etc. And it’s cute! And as of this posting it has over 180k views, 22.7k likes, and 186 comments on it! That’s a lot considering it was my third video and is also just kind of simple! Click through to see the full video.

It was wild seeing this video take off in real time. It started slowly but over the course of a few days, the number of views exploded! That felt really cool… I’d hit on something that was connecting with people! And I learned some things about TikTok, like that hashtagging your videos counts for a lot. Then I posted another informative video and it got… very little engagement. And then another one that was just kind of fun and it got relatively little engagement too. And I started to realize that going viral on TikTok wasn’t something that generally would occur to all my videos.

The next video I posted blew up too, and I think it’s just because it was a nexus of interests that combined my growing base of viewers who wanted to see Monster Hunter stuff with the ever-compelling Yoko Taro and a funny voiceover using text-to-speech.

My second viral video, currently with almost 47k views, over 6k likes, and 186 comments. Click through to see the full video.

This one was fun because it was subjects I’m interested in and it enabled me to put together a compelling video that also had information which I translated myself from Japanese to convey to the people who like to watch my videos. I actually put a lot of work into this video, going through my Monster Hunter Rise video library on Switch and creating new ones specially for this video. Probably one of my most fun videos to create and I’m glad it was so popular.

After this, I decided to keep making videos to see if I could stretch my creative legs and come up with any more viral gems. But also, I kept reminding myself not to care that much about whether videos went viral—I felt I was better off going with my own creativity and making videos I enjoyed rather than trying to use metrics and other tricks to get more views.

I was also testing a personal theory. Could I amass a creative mix of videos strong enough to gain a reliable following?

So I kept making videos. As of this post, my TikTok account has 47 videos on it, each under a minute in length. As it got later in the year, I branched out from Monster Hunter and started posting about other games, doing other types of stuff like taste testing game-related energy drinks and so forth. In general, these videos have gotten in the 200-1000 view range. I also have 937 followers, which is almost to that sweet spot of 1k followers that unlocks a lot of TikTok’s creator tools.

But, I also kind of dropped off as my work life balance tipped more towards work near the end of last year, unfortunately. I would like to keep creating videos, though! I actually really enjoyed it and I think if I didn’t already have a career and a PhD and such, I might have wanted to go into a life of video creation because I actually think I’m good at it too.

I’m probably most proud of a couple of the less popular of my videos.

The first one is a (very) short film I made called “The Hunt for the Curlhorn”. I thought it would be fun to try to create a “Western”-themed Monster Hunter mini-film. I recorded an entire hunt using a capture card (not the built-in capture on the Nintendo Switch” and cut it to a recording of Ennio Morricone’s “Ecstacy of Gold”. What a fun video to create.

A shot from my short video “Hunt for the Curlhorn.” Click through to see the full video.

One of the other videos I’m proud of is my video titled “The Real Place in Japan that inspired Monster Hunter Rise’s Infernal Springs”. This one (and a couple others), I actually put up on Youtube as well in widescreen because I felt that I could do them as much or more justice in that form factor.

The title shot of my video about The Real Place in Japan that inspired the Infernal Springs. Click through to see the full video.

I think the other videos I’m most proud of were actually a series of videos about the real traditional Japanese music instruments used in Monster Hunter Rise. These were not popular at all for whatever reason, but I enjoyed making them and researching them so… whatever!

And ultimately, I think that’s what I learned about myself from this experience. For me, since I made these videos for my own enjoyment, while having a lot of views on various videos was fun and I enjoyed it, the actual payoff came from creating things that I found interesting and fun myself. I’d like to continue to make more videos and fill out my library so I have a long list of videos that I can tap into and enjoy and that, hopefully, some likeminded people eventually stumble upon and enjoy as well.