Bhawna Ahuja is your typical social media savvy Mumbaikar who has also lived overseas, so it was quite natural that she took to vlogging, the trendy though inexpensive way in which upwardly mobile youth further their careers and grab their fifteen minutes of fame and fifteen thousand views. “It all started with being a successful fashion and beauty blogger at TheAwesomeSisters.com. But showing a pictorial tutorial wasn’t enough. My readers wanted me live-and-talking and showing them how to do things step by step instead of just pictures. They wanted to know the person behind the blog. That’s when I remembered some of the videos I saw on YouTube to learn a makeup technique. My blog readers were the driving force behind it but I’m also inspired by top vloggers Michelle Phan and Dulce Candy,” says Bhawna.
Her YouTube videos mainly cover fashion but also deal with allied subjects like styling, reviews, beauty tutorials, and often veer into areas like food and travel.
Then there’s VJ Joe aka Pratik Shigli, who runs, Joe ki pagal panti, about life, in general. “Making videos gives me immense satisfaction,” says Joe, whose parents are doctors but he himself wants to ‘cure’ people through his videos. He says his inspiration to do these videos was VJ-turned-actor Ayushmann Khurrana and his dream is to be on par with Ray William Johnson.
Typically, his videos garner between 300 to 500 views but the number zooms to thousands when he vlogs about his friend and singer Shraddha Sharma who is often described as India’s Justin Bieber, with her YouTube channel boasting of 7.5 lakh views. The Chandigarh-based singing sensation’s YouTube journey to success, famously started when her best friend in school annoyed her and she made a song video about it and posted it on YouTube, which then got her innumerable hits and fans.
The one terrific advantage that vloggers have over even film personalities is that they get pitchforked to a world stage, where they get to communicate with people in different continents. For instance, Toronto-based comedian Jasmeet Singh who posts about the predicaments of ‘brown existence’ in his two YouTube channels JusReign and Juslogs gets lakhs of hits. The recent case of the meteoric rise of Chandralekha, a housewife-turned-singing celebrity in Kerala, shows that even those who are not social-media savvy can reap benefits from YouTube exposure. She has no TV or computer at home and had never heard about social media but a few months ago, Chandralekha’s brother-in-law filmed her singing the famous Rajahamsame song with his mobile phone and uploaded it on YouTube. The video brought out her abject poverty, her complete innocence and her golden voice and a phone number was thoughtfully added. After it went viral, Chandralekha got thousands of calls including one from K.S. Chitra who sung the original song and a few from music directors who wanted her to sing for them. Today, she is too busy even to take calls, flitting from one recording studio to another and singing in different southern languages.
Lakshmi Menon, a Malayali who lives in Dubai, says she first became aware of the concept of vlogging when she saw a Hollywood movie. “Then I came to know that it’s not a future concept but happening right now. So I looked around for someone who is doing it in Malayalam but found none and thought why not start it?” she says. Today, she is proud of the ‘first Malayalam vlogger’ tag and tries to sustain her subscriber base of 3,500 by posting at least one video a week. “Vlogging is now the big thing, so unless something new pops up, I am not leaving this,” she quips.
Shooting home videos is akin to shooting an ad film, says Bhawna. There are various stages from deciding on a topic to conceputalising and making a storyboard. “Then we need to choose a clutter-free background and start shooting with a fully-charged camera. Initially, I started with natural lighting but now YouTube has turned me into a semi-technician and I sometimes use DIY lights, especially for makeup tutorials so that my audience can see the colours properly. Editing, meanwhile, is ‘the’ most important step of making videos. Most famous international vloggers edit their videos themselves, for eg. Michelle Phan.”
Yes, it is a lot of hard work but the vloggers feel it is worth all the trouble. Says Joe: “YouTube, as you know, offers the biggest mass connectivity. It not only gives you a great platform but it also provides a fair judgement to your talent.”
