"In your passions, that’s where you will succeed." - Meg DeAnglis aka MayBaby
Meg DeAnglis is HILARIOUS. Let’s just get that fact straight before we go onto talk about this Torontonian YouTuber, who now lives in LA, and has over 5.4 million subscribers on YouTube. We caught up with Meg, aka MayBaby, at the Faze Magazine Ignite Her event where she spoke to an intimate group of girls about how she started her Creator career, what keeps her motivated and advice on pursuing your passion.
Meg started her channel is 2008 with very little knowledge about technology and video editing. “I basically knew nothing,” Meg shares. “I had an old Dell laptop with an old video editor. I also used my mom’s old digital camera, and I used that to edit on too.”
Meg continued to push out video after video, all the while developing her video editing skills. It wasn’t as easy task, and Meg had to sacrifice something we all love: a social life and sleep. “I spent a lot of time alone because it’s hard to do stuff that I have to do on my computer and multitask, be social and be with friends – unless its an editing party that some of my friends and I do now. We sit in a room together and sit in front of each other while we’re on our laptops,” she explains. “But before then, it’s sort of a lonely thing. So, I had to sacrifice my social life, or sleep because if I wanted to be social I didn’t sleep much.”
And if you didn’t already know, YouTubers spend A LOT more time in front of their camera and computers filming and editing than the four to six minutes we enjoy from watching their videos. Meg breaks it down for us; “First, I have to think of an idea. Sometimes I see a suggestion in the comments and I think it’s really cool, so I take some time to structure it out. I write up the shot list and some ideas I have. I structure it out, but not too much because you don’t want to have it too scripted because then it doesn’t seem like real life anymore. Then the filming process begins. When I start this process I keep telling myself to keep it simple, but for some reason I start to add a million things in. All of that is about a day, then it takes me about a day to film. Editing can also take me about a day. Editing is kind of crazy because it’s sort of like it’s own little bubble, so once you start editing you start thinking about all of these ideas that you didn’t think about before. But since you now thought about them, you sort of now have to do them. So, all together I’d say it takes about three days to make a video.”
That’s a whole lot of time, energy and hard work spent on four to six minutes but with large sacrifices come big rewards. And the biggest reward for Meg is the ability to learn and connect with her friends and followers. “I’ve learned so much and my mind has been opened so much because they come from so many different places. Everyday I get new comments and I think ‘whoa I’ve never thought that way,” or new video ideas that I would never think of,” Meg shares.
Meg’s followers keep her motivated to do more with her channel, but she also has her own YouTube icon (and perhaps little girl crush?) that inspires her too – Lilly Singh aka ||SuperWoman||. “She’s doing so many amazing things, she’s probably one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met,” Meg says. “She has filmed videos that are fun and comedic, but also films inspiring videos as well; she has such a great balance. She does so many things but she does them all SO well.”
Hopefully we’ll see a future collab with MayBaby and ||Superwoman||, but until then, Meg has some new material in mind for her channel. “I took this summer off to have fun and to figure out what I really like. I’ve been really into music lately so I have some really cool covers planned. I also love music videos. I’ve always wanted to direct them, didn’t really know if I wanted to be in them or not, but that’s always been a goal of mine. I like music videos that have story lines,” Meg shares. “Aside from music, I really like scripted stuff. I did my first scripted series on my channel in May called ‘It’s a Girl Thing’ and I liked it. We did it all very small scale but it made me want to create more stuff like that. I love collaborating, and having other people on my channel, so I think it’d be a cool way to introduce new characters.”
Meg took the jump and started her YouTube channel with very little knowledge. She was committed and continued to push out video after video on her channel despite her challenges, like technical difficulties and sacrificing sleep and her social life. And she advises everyone to pursue their passion the same way: just take that jump. “Whatever you’re doing, there is always something that can go wrong. If you stay doing exactly what you’re doing now, instead of pursing your passion, something can still go wrong. At the same time, if you pursue your passion something could go wrong. So, the hardest thing is making the jump and having to do something extreme to get you started because once you get started, you have to keep going. Just start, keep focus, make yourself a plan and stick to it for a certain amount of time and eventually it’ll become your life.”
You can read more about MayBaby in the latest issue of Faze Magazine, available online and in-stores.
