The Text That Changed My Life

The text that changed my life wasn't televised, nor written on print, but was published on the platform that seems to be catching up to the popularity of modern day television; the internet, or more specifically, YouTube.

This particular text was a long term project, by a YouTuber who goes by the alias of BingRadio, or more famously SloMoZovo. BingRadio, or Chris Bingham, started 2012 with a new YouTube project called Past Bing Future Bing, or PBFB.

PBFB documented two years of Bing's life; he stock piled a year's worth of recording on his computer, having made a video log (vlog) every other day through the entirety of 2011, and released them on YouTube in accordance to the days that they were recorded, filling in the gap days with a vlog of himself a year in the future, 2012. He did this to record his change, and how his life progressed through the final year of university.

In a lot of ways, I used to aspire to be very much like Bing. He was living the life that I was desperate have. He studied film full time at Lincoln university, and lived with his friends who were equally into film making as he. Watching his progression, from a humble student in 2011, to a full time single-camera producer in 2012, elicited a sense of familiarity within me, in that I felt that I was to grow up in a very similar way to him.

It was with this project that I became inspired to delve into film making at an earlier stage, and to grasp as much experience as I could. I became more active on my YouTube account, generated a small (yet interactive) following, and decided that film making was no longer just a hobby I wanted to sustain, but a career I wanted to pursue.

All said, looking back at the project in 2015, I seem to have changed my mind in wanting to become exactly like Bing. I'm more interested in creating narrative films, as opposed to just talking to a camera and documenting my life, even though watching others do such is still very interesting to me. This may be due to my own life experience that I have gained since first finding the project, or this may be due to how I have seen Bing change ever since PBFB.

He no longer works on films, but instead chases a career involved with music, and his interests are now very different from my own. However, I do not believe that I would be as interested, if at all, in media/film as I am now if it wasn't for PBFB. To that end, the project changed my life.