In 2006, I was only a 15 year old high schooler. At the time, I don’t really recall being creative but my imagination was all over the place. The thing is, I didn’t really have a way to express my imagination. I was so focused on school and trying to pass my classes that I didn’t have time to just sit down and create something.
But I was really into a little book series called Harry Potter and it was still an ongoing series. The year prior, the fourth movie was released as well as the fifth book. I was already caught up to the book series so I spent a lot of my time online reading theories on where the story would go, talk on forums sharing my thoughts and even reading people’s fan fiction. In the fandom world, there’s a term called “shipping.” Basically, as a fan of the series, you imagine two characters as a couple and most of the time these two characters weren’t canonically together.
In the movies, the actors portraying the main character, Harry and his friend, Hermione, had very good chemistry. This was different in the book because their chemistry was more so like siblings and plus you know that they liked other people. Meanwhile, the way it was written in the movies and how the actors portrayed it, you could almost root for them to get together. In fact, I pretty much shipped the movie versions of Harry and Hermione.
A new website had just been released to the public at the end of 2005 called YouTube. I think a few friends from school had shown me the site and I’ve already been accustomed to it in mid-2006. Now I knew lots of people had shipped Harry and Hermione through fanfiction, but I saw something I’ve never seen before: people were taking clips from the movies and their favorite song and were editing it into a music video to make it look like Harry and Hermione had a thing for each other. I really loved seeing this so much that I wanted to make one too.
I learned that my computer already had a video editing program called Movie Maker which was a very linear editing program. All you could really do with it is do hard cuts and fade in/out transitions. There were also premade title clips which you’ve probably seen on 13 year old videos on YouTube. Somehow, I was able to download clips from the third and fourth movie trailer to use. I can’t remember how I was able to get those as at the time, downloading files was very difficult. I used the song “Crazy for this Girl” by Evan and Jaron as the background music, edited it all together and uploaded it onto YouTube 15 years ago.
I won’t be sharing this video with you but I will say that the video, somehow, is still available on YouTube to watch. It’s even got thousands of views on it. Maybe one day I’ll share it, but for now, I’ll keep it a mystery.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post. What was your first content that you published online?
Content By Sheena 
Pingback: How AMVs Played a Role in My Creative Journey – Content By Sheena