ZeFrank Changed My Life

Playlist here

Transcript:

From the top of Hong Kong, you’re watching a show with ZeFrank

ZeFrank didn’t just change my life, he changed yours too. You just don’t know it yet. 

Some creators are good, they churn out regular content which people enjoy and engage with. Some creators are great - maybe they do something entirely different, and make phenomenal work which has a big impact. Then there are creators who, due to some combination of talent, work, timing and luck, go beyond that - they change the game, or make it up entirely.

ZeFrank fits firmly in that last category. 

It’s fairly likely that you’ve seen a video he’s had a hand in making. You might have seen some videos from his personal channel - he has a pretty consistently hugely viewed series on animal facts that’s been going for over 7 years.

How about Buzzfeed? If you watched any videos from them between 2012-2018, you watched something that he likely personally oversaw - he was the President of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures (and occasionally also did voiceovers for videos).

How about a VLOG - any vlog. If you have, you probably have ZeFrank to thank for that, at least in part.

Who is this guy?

ZeFrank is a man of the internet. His first encounter with fame was through a viral email in 2001 which he sent to 17 of his closest friends. This email linked to a website of him dancing. Within a couple of days, this had over a million visitors. He stated elsewhere that 40 million people total saw the dance page. This was in 2001. 2001 people - there were only 25 million people on the planet at that time. We talk about TikTok dancing videos today as if it’s something new, ZeFrank taught the world to dance 20 years ago. 

Flash forward 5 years ZeFrank starts what was arguably the first regular vlog - theshow with ZeFrank . Every weekday for a year he posted a video - these were mostly tightly cut, comedic, sardonic clips of him, often focused on current affairs. Except it was more than that - theshow was interactive, he wanted to blur and blend the line between the separation of the internet and real, physical spaces.

Lets remember, this was 2006. This was long before CaseyNeistat. This man was way, WAY ahead of his time. Vlogbrothers and Wheezywaiter have gone on record as saying that ZeFrank was a huge inspiration for them even starting their channels in the first place. 

Theshow ran for exactly a year, ending on March 17, 2007, and that was that. 

Until, 5 years later ZeFrank returns. In 2012 He uses Kickstarter to raise money to bring back theshow but in a new way - same same, but different. This time, it was going to be called ‘A show with ZeFrank’

And it’s at this time, that I started watching his videos. 

Episodes of A Show varied from comedic, well articulated, seemingly chaotic monologues from Ze on all sorts of things from current affairs and beyond, to much slower paced, extremely affecting, micro-essays on aspects of the human experience. They normally featured a viewer submitted question, which Ze would use as a springboard into talking about these things.

These were first watched by 18 year old Jack. I had just finished school, and it caught me at a time in my life when I was just starting just starting to experience things like romantic love, anxiety, and I increasingly felt the weight of this big question “how am I going to exist as a person in the big world”

I had got through my teenage years by developing what I thought was justified cynicism about the world. Things like; God doesn’t exist. The heat death of the universe is inevitable and one should always keep their expectations low so that they can’t be disappointed. I was a few books away from being a full on nihilist.

Ze, at the time of filming A show, was 40. In his videos he came across as wise, extremely intelligent, but most importantly - kind. 

In Ze’s more sincere videos, there’s an underpinning of empathy and sensitivity to his work which I hadn’t experienced before on YouTube, or really much elsewhere in video. It seems odd to say but I didn’t know you could do that. He would articulate something so beautifully and poetically - capturing the experience but not locking it in a box - he also always left room for mystery and your own experience. Here’s an example. [the sweetness]

It didn’t feel like he was trying to be cool, or impress anyone, he was just being open and vulnerable - but in a lyrical, simple, and captivating way. He didn’t profess to have all the answers, or sometimes any - it was more that he didn’t demonise or belittle, denigrate or resent the issues he faced. He brought a sort of presence to them. Ze didn’t give you a clickbait answer of what you should do about these things, he created a space where you could sit and just sit with them - and see the beauty in that. 

I left his videos feeling more human. Sometimes I felt seen - his videos felt like they were about my life, and he helped me understand myself better. And in videos which I couldn’t relate to personally, I left feeling I could better understand other people around me. His videos were like consistent injections of emotional maturity and wisdom at a very important transition period in my life. He helped me grow up. 

While watching his videos, on top of everything else, I had one other sensation; I wanted to make stuff like that (I definitely never tried).

I ended up watching videos from his original show back in 2006 (one such complete playlist is actually hosted by the vlogbrothers themselves), and some of those videos continue to influence me. In fact, a chance re-watching of his video on Brain Crack basically caused me to start this year of bad art project.[video here]

There were so many cool aspects of community for A Show - every episode would feature an intro from a viewer, some of which you might recognise as people who went on to become big names in YouTube. The intro you watched at the start of this video was something I recorded to submit but was too scared to. Many episodes featured an artist animating a viewers dream, and a cover of the ‘bye-bye’ song. 

So I was hooked on A show. I watched every episode, keeping up with them week on week - these videos which would do everything from amuse me to nourish my soul, until, one day, there were no more episodes.

There was no grand goodbye, no curtain closing, just, a ceasing of a show. Ze was still uploading  videos - some of which were even more moving and cinematic [such as videos about time you have left in jellybeans, or why trust is worth it]. But no more episodes of a show came to pass. The last one we got was March 5, 2013 [Don’t yuck my yum - yum getting yucked is when you like something harmless and someone tells you to stop liking it]. Soon to follow were extended hiatuses in uploading, punctuated by true facts about animals. 

There’s online speculation about why it stopped when it did, Ze’s done a few interviews where he just said there was less engagement, and he didn’t want to make something that wasn’t growing. Which makes sense. Plus, he was also bought by Buzzfeed around that time - he became the president of Buzzfeed motion pictures, a rapidly growing media empire. This surely took time and energy. 

Ze started a side channel where, for a time, we got a sort of spin-off series which focused on the same sort of emotional, raw, introspective content I so enjoyed. Ze discussed how he envisioned his anxieties as monsters…

But soon those ended too. And that was that. 

While some of his videos were about current affairs, much of his work is perennial. I’ve revisited them here and there over the years as I’ve gotten older - and each time I get something new out of them. I can better relate to his thoughts on life now that I have more experience of love, loss, anxiety and the like. In some ways they’re more impactful than ever. Some of his videos are like an old favourite book that I’ve reread a dozen times, or an old song that reminds me of an important moment. And it’s not just me. One need only browse the comments, sorting by either top or new, to see how much he is missed, or how powerfully affecting some of his work was. 

While Ze was at Buzzfeed he popped up on YouTube now and again - giving fascinating talks about how he thought about shareable media. Watching these gives a great insight into how Buzzfeed must have thought about making all the things they did, and why they were made precisely to go as viral as possible every single time. [There’s a difference between shareable media and consumable media]

In 2019 he left BuzzFeed. Since then, he’s been making the odd animal facts video, and has a patreon (he’s also on twitter).

While Ze is quick to downplay this, he has undoubtedly had an impact on the internet and video culture. More than most ever will. Both as a creator in himself and as a mastermind behind the scenes. 

Ze’s work profoundly influenced me - on how I thought about being a person in the world. I learned a lot about creativity, about media, about empathy. Retrospectively, it was my first real exposure to - Creative non-fiction. A pursuit of examining life, and relating it to broader questions. A way of capturing back those hours and experiences, making them all worth something. And not just giving them meaning but being able to hold them. Like how an equation can hold all the gravity in the universe in a few neat lines. 

But I think what was most valuable was the realisation that it’s wonderful to be you. Not just to be unabashedly you - to try random things for the heck of it, but also to be deeply you. To really take a moment and articulate what you experience, so that other people can see and understand. There’s beauty in that, and it makes peoples’ lives better. Maybe that’s the real value of art itself. Who knows.   

And Ze if you ever see this, I know I speak for a lot of people when I say, thank you

[blinkl]