In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World Page 12

  Once we wrapped for the day, I told the producer how excited I was.

  “I can’t believe this is how it’s going to be from now on!”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “It isn’t. We don’t have that kind of budget. You guys are still responsible for producing your own content at least once a week. We can only afford to do things at this level about once a month.”

  That was still incredible, but now that we had something with such a high production quality, going back to our old do-it-yourself style would look really low budget in comparison. We struggled to come up with content to post in between shooting music videos with Maker Studios, so we mostly relied on “Week in Review” and “Ask WinterSpringPro” bits.

  Our first six months in LA flew by, and we began to settle into our new lives. Luke and I started to grow especially close, and my favorite thing was to spend hours at his house playing video games. I’d never had a close male friend before, and it felt great to not feel threatened by a guy. I could be myself around him without any fear that he was going to tease me for acting feminine. The only problem was that Brittany didn’t particularly enjoy sitting around his house and watching us play video games, and she was the one with the car.

  I started spending more and more time at Luke’s house, and I guess that’s when Brittany and I started to drift apart. Part of me resented the fact that I did most of the work when it came to WSP. I wished that we could share the editing responsibilities, but she wasn’t as comfortable with it and I wasn’t crazy about her style of editing, so I’d mostly take over. We also had different views on money. She liked to save hers, but I wanted to go out and discover our new city. Los Angeles isn’t exactly the cheapest place to live, but the way I saw it, dining out with Luke and all the other new friends I was making was sort of like investing in my future there. The tension between us slowly started to build, but neither of us was very good with confrontation, so the unease festered.

  Luke ended up having a really good idea to help us make more money. When Brittany and I first started doing music parodies, we had found a friend on YouTube we would pay to sing the songs for us because neither of us can carry a tune to save our lives. Then we’d lip-synch along to the results. But since Luke was a musician, he had tons of his own recording equipment. He convinced us that we could sing and record our own lyrics, and then he could touch them up in postproduction to make them sound good. That meant we owned the rights so we could sell the songs on iTunes. The first video that we actually sang on was a parody of Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” and from then on it was always us. The extra revenue wasn’t a whole lot, but it helped ease up some of the financial tension between Brittany and me.

  Signs That It’s Time to Ditch Your Motel Room and Sleep in the Car

  1. Soapscum–lathered clumps of hair in the tub drain.

  2. Broken locks on the door or windows.

  3. Cigarette burns on the bed cover.

  4. Stained towels and/or sheets.

  5. Bedbugs. ALWAYS check the mattress edges for these critters. They will try and hitch a ride home with you. They look like reddish little beetles, but honestly, if you see any kind of insect on your mattress, just run.

  Avoid Conflict Early On

  This is something I’m trying to get better at. I hate conflict and try to avoid it at all costs, but I also know that it’s important to express your emotions right off the bat rather than have bad feelings and resentment build up. If you’re having an issue with a friend, bring it up sooner rather than later. They might not have any clue that anything is wrong, and working out small stuff early on can prevent a big falling out in the future.

  Chapter 13

  Breaking Out

  I’d started my own personal Joey channel back in 2010, but never really posted much on it. There were fewer than twenty videos there between the time I decided to leave school and when we moved to Los Angeles. But once we arrived and I started to spend more time out and about on my own, I began recording adventures—nothing constant, just fun short updates about my life whenever the mood struck.

  Sometimes I’d shoot little behind-the-scenes pieces about WSP videos or film a trip to Disneyland that I took with Luke and Meghan (who had also decided to move to LA), but I didn’t take the channel too seriously. I was busy making new friends, in particular a girl named Cat, Meghan’s roommate, and another girl, named Whitney, whom I met through Luke. We all clicked and formed a close little circle. It felt wonderful to have a solid group of friends I could count on after struggling for so long.

  That June I went home to Massachusetts for a visit. It was my first trip back since moving west, and I was shocked by how gray and drab everything looked in comparison to the perpetual sunshine that always lit everything up in Los Angeles. My mom was in a really good place at the time, so there wasn’t any drama and we got along great. She even dyed my hair dark for me in the kitchen, and I was itching to get back to LA the whole time I was there to show it off to my friends.

  Brittany had flown back to Massachusetts to visit too, but she had arrived a week earlier than me. I had been devouring The Hunger Games books at the time and was utterly obsessed. I’d even started ending all of my vlogs by saying, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” So after Brittany left, Whitney, Luke, and I decided to shoot a parody video about the series set to Britney Spears’s “I Wanna Go.” The three of us wrote all the lyrics, recorded them, and then shot the footage ourselves the day before I left. I played Gale, Luke played Peeta, and Whitney played Katniss. The song was all about the two of us vying for her attention, and in the end she picks both of us.

  I finished editing it while I was back home in Massachusetts, and once I posted the video, it absolutely exploded. It became WinterSpringPro’s biggest video ever. It was a little odd that Brittany hadn’t been part of it, but she didn’t mind; she still got her cut of the profits. But it got me thinking about how my creative interests were much more in line with those of my new friends. Luke, Whitney, Meghan, and Cat: they all loved anime and video games and dystopian novels as much as I did. Brit liked these things too, but she wasn’t as passionate about them as the rest of us.

  In October, Luke’s girlfriend at the time, a beauty vlogger named Ingrid Nilsen, persuaded me to participate in something called Vlogtober, a sort of call-to-arms for occasional YouTubers to see if they can post a vlog every day for the entire month. I had so much fun doing it that I decided to keep doing it in November. And then December. And before I knew it, daily vlogging became a full-time gig.

  Around the same time that I was starting to lose interest in WinterSpringPro and focus on my own channel, Brittany and I were approached about a potential brand deal. I can’t say what it was for, but it doesn’t matter because it didn’t pan out. But about a week later, the same company reached out about another project. The problem was that they wanted only me, not Brittany.

  It was for a website called teen.com, and I quickly learned that they had reached out to Meghan and Cat as well. The three of us went in for a meeting and found out that the website’s producers were looking for new hosts for teen.com’s YouTube channel, which sounded fun. Then they started tossing some paycheck numbers around and we just about flipped. It was more money than any of us had ever seen in our lives, and we were all struggling to get by at the time.

  It was too good an opportunity to pass up, but it presented a lot of problems for me as well. First, I felt guilty that they wanted only me, not Brittany and WinterSpringPro. They were interested in my Joey channel, which at that point had around 70,000 subscribers. The other problem was that in order for me to work with them, I’d need to have my solo channel hosted on Alloy, teen.com’s parent site, instead of on Maker Studios’ site.

  I was too young and naive at the time to know that when it comes to business, it’s always best to be honest and upfront. But I was too scared that Maker would say no if they knew I was going to another site to make more money, and so I lied: I said that I wanted
to use my solo channel to enter a YouTube video contest, but anyone who was affiliated with a host site was automatically disqualified. Since WinterSpringPro was the channel they’d originally signed, they had no problem giving my little Joey channel back to me to host wherever I wanted. I then turned around and gave my channel to Alloy. (It was hardly an issue for Maker Studios in the end. Disney ended up buying it for 500 MILLION DOLLARS!!!)

  Teen.com was a lot of fun at first. I’d work two or three times a week doing shows with Cat and Meghan, and on occasion I’d cover movie junkets. A junket is basically an opportunity for the cast of a new movie to do a ton of interviews at once. They usually get booked into a hotel and a slew of journalists get a chance to meet them. They are huge day-long affairs and pretty exhausting for the celebrities, who have to answer the same questions over and over and over again for different media outlets. The trick to getting a good interview is to come up with questions that they probably hadn’t been asked yet.

  Over the next few months, I ended up interviewing some pretty big names, like Taylor Swift, Zac Efron, and Rachel McAdams. But I almost peed myself when I got the assignment to interview the cast of The Hunger Games. The publicity team at Lionsgate arranged for me to see a screening a month before the movie came out in theaters, and I was openly sobbing during Rue’s death scene. I couldn’t wait to meet Amandla Stenberg, the girl who played her, so it was a total shock when I walked into the interview and she recognized me!

  “Hey, you’re the guy who did that Hunger Games music video parody!” she said.

  “Oh my god, we listened to that over and over on the set,” said Alexander Ludwig, the guy who played Cato.

  “Look, I have it on my iPod!” said Isabelle Fuhrman, the girl who played Clove. She started singing the lyrics.

  The idea that these people were listening to something that I had created while they were shooting what was probably my favorite movie ever at the time blew my mind. It made me feel that I had a special connection to the film, as if I had been a part of it. It was an incredible way to start an interview.

  My channel was growing so fast that I barely had time to sit and really think about the fact that my life was changing drastically. I was grateful and excited and scared all at once, and those three emotions became a sort of internal engine for me to keep going. It was what gave me the strength to finally make a decision I’d been delaying for a while: it was time to officially end WinterSpringPro.

  Brittany and I hadn’t made a video together for a few months at that point, and I think we both knew it was over. She was sad when I told her, but she understood. It wasn’t like we were ending our friendship, and she wished me well. She knew that all sorts of different doors were opening for me.

  As that year went on, I ended up getting to go to the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards and interview celebrities on the red carpet. But instead of the interviews getting easier and becoming more natural, I started to develop more and more anxiety each time I had to do one. I started worrying that I would say the wrong thing or, worse, forget what I was supposed to say and just stand there silently. And there were other things going on in my life at the time that I knew needed more attention—great big life-altering things that I was finally coming to terms with.

  Tips for Starting a Vlog

  1. Get amped up! You’ve got to have a lot of energy. If you’re not excited, why would your viewers be?

  2. Define your personality, and keep it consistent. Find your unique voice.

  3. Make daily things like going to the grocery store way more thrilling than they actually are. Get really, really psyched about that sale on kale.

  4. It’s always good to have someone to bounce things off of. Enlist a friend, family member, or a cute pet (hi, Wolf!) for you to interact with.

  5. Come up with something that no one else has ever done before that will make you stand out. If you come up with a concept that you think is awesome, do some Googling to make sure it’s not already out there.

  Best and Worst Celebrity Interviews

  The coolest famous person I ever got to interview was Taylor Swift. There is nothing weird or manufactured about her—what you see is what you get. She was kind and sweet and immediately started up an actual conversation with me, as opposed to the normal Q&A format that celebrity interviews usually take. She made me feel comfortable, and not once did I think she was putting on an act for me.

  The worst experience I ever had with a celebrity was with . . . well, I’m not going to tell you her name. I don’t want to trash-talk anyone. But I will say that she was a Disney star and that she spent almost the entire interview typing away on her phone and avoiding eye contact. I eventually asked her a totally innocent question about what it feels like to be famous, and she snapped at me and got all huffy, telling me that she wasn’t any different now than she had been before becoming a public figure. So I guess that means she’s always been a brat!

  Ten Celebs I’d Love to Be Best Friends With

  Lana Del Rey: We could go on a wine-tasting trip together and then have a picnic in a meadow.

  Ellen DeGeneres: I think she’d be a blast to go to Disneyland with.

  Miley Cyrus: Hey, girl, let’s party!

  Marina Diamandis from Marina and the Diamonds: She’s Welsh, and I want her to show me all over Europe.

  Jennifer Lawrence: All I want to do is hang at her house with her inner circle of friends and talk and laugh.

  Nina Debrov: I’d like her to take me shopping. She’s got great style.

  Nicholas Hoult: I can see us playing games at an arcade together and bonding.

  Nicole Kidman: I know she’s Australian, but I’d still love to have English high tea with her because she’s so classy.

  Brendon Urie: Dude, you should totally come over to my house and play video games some time.

  Taylor Swift: I feel that we could go to a flea market together and she’d immediately be able to pick out all the coolest stuff from piles of junk.

  My Favorite Anime Shows and Movies

  These all have very involved plots but I’ll do my best to try and describe them simply. But you HAVE to watch these. The layers of depth in each one are utterly mind-blowing. Japanese storytelling is much more interesting and weird and dark than anything I’ve seen produced in America. They get fantasy right.

  Claymore. Forget Panem’s thirteen districts. The world in this series has forty-seven, and each one has its own kick-ass female warrior who protects the population from nasty shape-shifters that eat people.

  Fullmetal Alchemist. Two brothers lose their mom and then hunt down an alchemist to try and bring her back to life. But that fails, and they end up losing parts of their own body and have to try and find a cure. This description does no justice to how much else happens. Just watch it.

  Code Geass.This series takes place in a universe where our world is divided among three superpowers, including one called Britannia. Britannia takes over Japan using giant robots, but a Britannian prince ends up getting stuck in Japan during the destruction and vows to take revenge on his homeland.

  My Neighbor Totoro. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the best anime directors ever. In this film, two girls move with their dad to a new house close to the hospital where their mom is staying. They discover a whole world of magical creatures living in and around their new home and have a bunch of adventures with them.

  Spirited Away. Another Miyazaki film. In this one, a little girl gets sucked into a spirit world where her parents are turned into pigs and she is forced to work in a witch’s bathhouse to try and figure out a way to free herself and them. It won an Academy Award.

  Inuyasha. A girl goes to a well and gets sucked inside by a gross centipede demon and ends up five hundred years in the past where she finds out she’s a reincarnated priestess. And then shit gets weird.

  Chapter 14

  Surprise!

  I’m gay.

  Chapter 15

  Dating and Rejection

 
; This is my first time coming out in public, and I’m proud and relieved to be finally telling you all. Ever since I first appeared on YouTube, my sexuality has been the biggest question anyone ever had about me. It was frustrating, especially when I was younger, because while I knew on some level that I had crushes on guys as well as girls, I was nowhere near ready to fully admit it to myself or my friends. Plus, I wanted people to focus on the things I was creating, not whether I wanted to kiss boys.

  I think another big reason it took me so long to come out to my friends—and now you—is that I was teased about being feminine so much when I was a kid. Part of me felt that confessing that I was gay would be validating all of the jerks who ever bullied me. Being called gay as an insult had left me emotionally scarred. And although I knew I would probably never speak to any of those kids again in my life, I still felt that I had to stand my ground against them. When it came right down to it, I just didn’t want to be gay. And part of me was frustrated that just because I acted feminine, everyone automatically assumed I was gay. Sure, it was true, but I didn’t want to feed into a stereotype just because I was acting in a way that came naturally to me.

  So I continued to avoid and ignore the question. My life is so public as it is, and I needed something of my own that I could keep for myself, especially after I moved out to Los Angeles and first got the guts up to start exploring my sexuality.

  It’s strange to live with knowledge about yourself that you believe is never going to become part of your actual physical life. For a long time, I genuinely believed that I would always like girls and keep my boy crushes in this tiny little place in the back of my head. But pretty much as soon as I moved to Los Angeles and faced a whole world of dating possibilities, I finally had to own up to the fact that there is a HUGE difference between thinking a girl is pretty and being sexually attracted to her.