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Reinvigorating My Childhood Passions Through Creating YouTube Content.
My name is Erik Engbo and I’m a 34-year-old Swede that lives in (wait for it) Sweden. As far as being a so-called content creator, everything I do nowadays is just a hobby that includes filmmaking tutorials and passion projects like short films. I’m a one-person army 99% of the time, I even make short films by myself when no-one wants to play with me. Haha. The name Standard Film Team is like an inside joke me and my brother had back in the day and I just kept it. It should be more like Standard One-man Filmmaker or something but I’m just too lazy to change it haha.
I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, started editing my brothers and I crappy short films that were shot on my dad’s old Hi8 camera when I was 14. As a side note, there’s some footage of me back in 1992 running around in mom and dad’s kitchen with a wooden toy rifle. The first action “film” I was ever involved in. Haha. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch but you could say I’ve been doing these kinds of things almost my entire life. What keeps me motivated is passion, just the pure fun of creating something from nothing and sharing it with other people. I guess I’m a bit of a weirdo in my so-called career path.
In my mid 20’s I started to get actual clients for video work but it was just part-time and I ended up not liking it at all after a while. I later got the opportunity to work as a videographer for a small IT business which lasted for about 2.5 years until I was laid off due to poor management overall. After that, I basically just said, “screw it.” I’m gonna do my own thing just for fun no matter if I’m gonna be making a living out of it, or not, thus youtube.com/standardfilmteam became a creative outlet for me.
I get my ideas when I do everyday, mundane tasks that I don’t particularly enjoy doing, like mowing the lawn, shopping for groceries, anything that doesn’t involve video/filmmaking. Haha. My problem is that I have like 7-10 ideas at once, so, I’m a bit all over the place from time to time. It’s hard to just focus on one idea so I end up making a bunch of project folders on my computer with a bunch of notes. For example, I started shooting for an upcoming lens review then I ended up shooting a short film all of a sudden in between, so now, the lens review has to wait until the film is done. Things can get quite sporadic as I’m a bit of a “project-a-holic”.
I’ve been an Adobe guy pretty much since the start. I started using Photoshop as a teenager and went to Premiere when I started editing videos. Just making trial and errors along the way, you have to understand that there were no tutorial videos back then, YouTube didn’t even exist! I am on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. My Twitter page doesn’t count cause I don’t use it. I’m not a huge fan of Twitter.
Being a person that’s been fooling around behind/in front of cameras since 1992 and also been a musician running, goofing around on stage, I’ve built up sort of a mental shield towards what other people might think of me. You can’t be loved by everyone and I’m totally fine with that. That said, I do get stuck sometimes when I maybe put in too much work into a video that doesn’t require it. Also being a non-native English speaker can mess up the workflow. Sometimes I’ll say a sentence up to ten times before it gets passable and even then you can still hear my Swedish accent that I’m desperately trying to hide. Haha. I’m always impressed by Swedes that can speak, at least to my ears, perfect English.
I guess you could say that I’ve been into the whole YouTube thing since 2015 but it’s been pretty sporadically between each upload. I think at one time I didn’t upload anything for almost four or five months which is not great but life has a tendency to get in the way when you’re rocking the normal and the content creating life at the same time. I’ve definitely improved since the start. I try to upload at least once a week but I think my average upload cycle is once every other week or so. My goal is to upload twice a week, maybe I’ll get there someday.
I have a little over 4K subscribers now and get around 160-170 new subscribers each month which may not sound like much but I’m truly grateful for all the support I get. Even small channels can have monetized videos, just saying. I don’t think I have a certain video that went super “viral” and then overall viewership went up. Most of the time, at least for me, things are relatively slow at the start and you think that video was a misfire. Then you go back a couple of weeks later and you see that you’ve got a few hundred more views. Then you check again and it’s a thousand views and so on and so on.
My advice for aspiring content creators would be,
Keep it simple, you don’t need to have super flashy equipment in order to create something awesome.
No budget? No problem, I say. If you wanna vlog but can’t afford a camera, use your phone and just direct the lamp on your desk to your face. Or get a LED work light at your local hardware store and diffuse the light with a white shower curtain or something if you want that softer look. Everything is what you make of it. The challenge is to get to know your audience and what works and what doesn’t for them. To tell you the truth, that's something I’m still trying to figure out. Haha. Finding your niche and audience will be a challenge. You can either check whatever’s popular on social media, replicate that and sell your soul for a potential fast result or make something original that will take it’s time to grow but it’ll be rewarding in a different way when it’s something you really care about.
I’m not a fulltime creator so I have a normal day job to pay the bills, nothing wrong with that.
