#video creator

Just a quiet moment… unless you decide to get closer.

Careful — I tend to look back.

my alight motion has CORRUPTED the end of my project so that it won’t export without just being a still frame. i have tried EVERYTHING. making it in multiple parts, grouping the layers so that theres less layers, everything under the sun. it still won’t work.

the project is 48 minutes long as of right now. ive spent MONTHS on it editing it down. i dont want to give up, but im running out of options to try and fix it with.

I am a photographer and video creator

As a content creator (mainly YouTube) who has been in some kind of creative hibernation for the past seven years and now wants to come back, it’s a really strange time to return.

No matter what I try, it feels like YouTube is dead for fan videos. The era of TikTok and Instagram has taken over, and people’s attention spans have changed so drastically that nothing works anymore that worked 18 years ago.

Subscribers don’t matter anymore. The urge to scroll is so strong that if a video doesn’t pop in two seconds, you fail — and the algorithm sorts you out.

It’s not just nostalgia — the entire rhythm of how people watch has changed.

Having more than one or two days of popularity for a video on TikTok is unlikely. The format is horrible for high-quality posts that used to come in a horizontal format.

I feel that all big creators who used to make videos struggle with the same problem. I see one video on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes, but the creator only has a few followers. The same video on YouTube gets less than 100 views.

I get it, my old subscribers from 10+ years ago have aged and moved on. Fandoms change, of course.

But as a creator, it’s hard to change your video style after all this time. Instead of making videos of 1–2 minutes, switching to 20-second formats packed with effects to keep people engaged — with almost zero tension buildup or emotional transitions — is now the key.

But that doesn’t work for everyone. It’s not the content I want to create. It’s not the purpose of creation.

Yes, I create for myself and not for likes, but after being used to getting lots of comments (from people who actually took time to write something instead of just reacting with an emoji), this feels really wrong. I genuinely wanted to get back into the game because I love editing, but it feels totally useless.

Yeah, I talked about this issue with my best friend, ChatGPT — basically because he confirmed all my thoughts and told me that I need to change my approach or move on. But what struck me was something he wrote in one of his answers:

TikTok is Fast Food, YouTube is a Library.

Because it’s the truth. I still get comments on videos from 18 years ago. People still watch old shows. They still look for content and entertaining videos. And my old stuff ranks well on YouTube. My new videos, though, will never be seen — because too much is produced today by too many people, with too much repetition and keyword spam. No one looks for “fan video” or “tribute” anymore, and that’s okay. Some fandoms are niche and others barely have search volume once they ended, that's okay too. But the sheer amount of official clips from shows and movies uploaded every day pushes fan content further down.

What I really loved was this note from ChatGPT:

4 Comforting Truths

1. You are not obsolete — the platforms simply optimized for a different type of creator.

2. Your editing style has timeless artistic value; it just doesn’t fit the fast-scroll economy.

3. It’s okay to create for yourself now, not for an algorithm or audience metric.

4. You can always come back later — maybe in a few years, the pendulum will swing back toward longer, quality content (and it’s already starting to, in pockets).

Yeah, thank you. Did it help me to figure out what to do? Not really. Did it open my eyes a little more? Yeah.

Anyway, this is just a little rant, and I probably should have noticed all of this a long time ago, but I barely used TikTok before and had no idea it had become such a big problem until I became active again. Now it really hits — and I’m struggling between wasting more time on the things I love, pouring in hours of dedication, versus just stopping entirely. But I’d have to stop all my social accounts too, because seeing other fan work always strikes my heart and pulls me back into the editing program…