Exposing ZHC - Part 1...

good i've been like a nice cup of tea did i spill the tea this video is brought to you by skillshare i am going to be brutally honest in this video and i don't know where that's going to take me but i know that i carry some biases having been in the art community on youtube for a very long time and having seen zach come up from out of nowhere and completely overtake all other art channels very impressive and actually i've learnt a lot from him and i think the art community as a whole does owe a lot to what he's taught us but i have some negative feelings about zhc that i want to explore and maybe maybe discover that i'm just biased in ways that cloud my vision or some of my interactions experience and observations over time might be legitimized through the process of watching every single one of the videos that he's made that shouldn't take too long [Music] so i've just done a fairly loose calculation 3362 minutes it turns out it's 56 hours of content this is going to be a longer video than i thought it would be that's not to mention the 54 hours of streamed content that is done he's done like two 24-hour streams come on the most recent video that he's put out as recording this video i customized a 10 million house and gave it to my girlfriend that's a very ambitious and large video we'll see that at the end of this whole endeavor who knows how i'll be feeling by that i do have a feeling that giving your girlfriend a 10 million house is kind of like giving yourself a 10 million dollar house just a little bit if you live with your friend but that's a you know we'll get there we'll find out how we feel about that later zhc 22.9 almost 23 million subscribers this is huge his videos average anywhere between 10 to 20 30 million views insane and a lot of his videos seem to be pretty benevolent it customizes and gives things away to people this is what he's most known for and it all really started around this period customizing an iphone and then he just had hit after hit after hit he obviously uh discovered the perfect paint to go viral i don't know where he shops but i really want to get me some of that viral blue purple teal like that pink sparkly paint this is some secret sauce in that paint so i'm going to call this current era zach what is the earliest version of zach and how did zhc evolve into the behemoth he's become i think the first thing to start off with is to share my current opinion on zack and that is the reason i cut that is because i'm saving it i uh i'm gonna react to my opinion after i've seen every piece of content he's put out there maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm very very right i have a lot of content to watch in this room i have 10 000 kernels of dried corn ready to pop so i've got 10 minutes to pop all 10 000 pieces of corn first once you hear the first pop gets the first piece of corn nothing makes me feel better than giving so i'm going to package up some of my favorite pieces of custom popcorn give them to my friends hey dave sorry to interrupt bro i know you work really really hard so i thought if anyone would appreciate a piece of custom popcorn it's you oh it's wet what did you put on that i think someone else who works hard who's gonna appreciate some popcorn hey rob man you worked so hard and you picked the first piece of popcorn to pop so i customized a piece of popcorn oh my god what is it it's for the content i need the pocket wait i don't want to eat the popcorn rob [Music] feels good to give okay let's get stuck into this video number one all right video one what's the verdict really strong start great art really cool tips love the music good vibe i think this guy's got potential actually really cool to see those humble beginnings really really cool so i'm gonna say i was really impressed with the vibe like this was someone who clearly has a lot of artistic talent incredible drawings what a pretty loud high pace and upbeat music for actually what's visually quite a fairly slow presented drawing process at times but this was a different youtube i'd say for four going on five years ago this is this was pretty up there content in terms of pacing i have to say the quality of some of the camera angles and visuals really impressed me like for a brand new art youtube channel to just be diving into it at that level really impressive i think the other thing worth mentioning is at this point at least it's just hard really simple very different to you know what he's doing now but very interesting to see how it started in this early phase of his channel zack was 18 years old still a teenager and my impressions of him at this time and in this early chunk of his channel is he is a good artist like really good his ability to convey scale his instincts with contrast and his ability to create this visceral intensity and use detail really epic stuff like a phenomenal artist especially as an 18 year old so a few highlights from day one my favorite video from this time was his workspace tour he'd only recently graduated high school which he mentioned in a previous video in this video he sort of showed his college dorm and it was just the details his treasured comic books his favorite tools of the frames drawing he did of his classmates all these little details that show that art really is his happy place and it's a world he's the master of i found that super relatable and really charming my favorite artwork that i saw in this chunk of watching his content was the pacific rim kaiju piece phenomenal just genuinely mind-blowing and then the most interesting video i found at the time was actually the my artist journey video first of all it was adorable that he sat himself down and interviewed himself but i also think this started to show a bit of a movement in how we created content there was a quote here where he says things became more serious when people started following me this is interesting followers were his motivation for making art now i relate to this too this isn't any accusation at the end of the day art is his performance medium more than just his craft but more than that under the surface this is the first video where i really see him use his life drama and storytelling at the core element of the video and soon after this in his earliest q a we see him lean into the online personality element making some jokes and puns quite a lot lending it to more of the playful side of content rather than just tutorials and drawing videos i'm learning a lot that i didn't expect to learn there's a lot of context and probably respect i feel like i'm going to gain through going through this process but i'm really interested in how it shapes over time there's so much we're going to get to because obviously things change a lot and i'm fascinated going through this whole journey but it's a lot so i'm going to go take a break this is fine this is a good idea all right getting stuck into day two it's still mainly tutorials but with style he starts introducing regular bloopers more vlog style filming holding the camera in his hand and it's a little more personality based content and i really suspect that it's around this point that zach's content started to become the new art medium he was really enjoying playing with now there's an interesting first sign of a trend that i would start to see further into his career which is the use of people to get clicks in particular the one that stood out to me was stephen hawking it's a 15 minute vlog titled stephen hawking's drawing tribute art vlog it only actually features any mention of stephen hawkings and the last tiny portion of a fairly aimless vlog video completely unrelated to stephen hawking's and it feels really thrown in at the end i get the feeling that it was sort of convenient low hanging fruit as a framing mechanism for the vlog which otherwise had no seeming purpose or hook as the months go on there's a lot of experimentation here he's trying to find things that work but it was on april 21st 2018 where zach experienced the first taste of true greatness where his art was featured in a pewdiepie video and not only did he get attention from the biggest content creator on youtube but he also got to use that moment to propel his own channel into the spotlight even further in his next two videos he legitimately got to use pewdiepie's name and likeness in a title and thumbnail and this was no accident of course in the y 30 pewdiepie centered a lot of the content around the lizard mark zuckerberg me a meme circa 2018. hmm very good year that very week zach made his own art of lizard zuckerberg and posted on pewdiepie's subreddit the following lawyer his art was noticed and featured lawyer31 zack had a plan to get featured in and gain attention from the largest content creator on all of youtube and it worked i have a feeling this was a huge lesson for him about how much more compelling and successful a piece of content on his channel could become if it was centered around someone already incredibly successful on the platform he was clearly trying to succeed on let me just reiterate i don't think i can say this enough i'm not framing any of this as negative but when i talk about the evolution of his content it's purely just observation and a large part it ties in with the evolution of youtube as a whole where day one my impression was this is a very talented and hard-working person my day two observation is this is a very talented and hard-working person who works smart he's got a plan and he knows how to figure out how to make something work and he works for it but on an ever-evolving platform where attention becomes more and more viscerally commodified does that come at a cost by the way i can't say what he's doing is innately negative because i'm doing this is a zhc video it was innately negative i'm painfully aware that i'm saying that about myself so once again not going for negativity just observation so alas art tutorials on youtube would eventually pretty much die except within niches that would be hard to find which is why i'm really excited that this video is sponsored by skillshare i used to love making video tutorials on youtube i really love being a content creator and making entertaining content but i still love teaching there just isn't a place for it here skillshare there is and i'm a proud skillshare teacher i've got like four classes now the last one i did was the most comprehensive one i've done so far so go check out my brand new course on human anatomy on skillshare i take you through the entire body male and female and through three steps from sketching and blocking to shaping and then refining and detailing human anatomy if anatomy is not particularly a cup of tea but you want to learn some character design i have a whole class on character design i also have a whole class on character illustration from start to finish and on being a youtuber if you're interested in this content creation stuff and i've even got a class on how to talk to camera but it's not just my classes there are thousands and thousands of incredible classes over on skillshare and you can try them all with a free trial for 30 days for the first 1 000 people to use my link in the description whether you're wanting to learn illustration or animation youtube and social media how to make and run your own business or more niche stuff from crafting to needlepoint resin pouring loads of cool stuff so if you want to improve yourself learn new things and further yourself go over to skillshare once again the first 1000 people who use my link in the description will get a 30 day free trial huge thank you of course the skillshare for sponsoring this video i'm going to just go bright when i come back next phase of the zhc i continue to watch lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of chd videos and at this point you know it all started to merge into a bit of a blob in my mind as i was slowly going insane and started to use this time to practice my stop-motion body time-lapse animation i think that was time well spent zach is hitting his stride in the channel he's confident he's dynamic he begins talking a lot about the daily grind and the zhc fam as his hustle continues and his content gets more refined he gets new cameras and does his first merch drop right around when he hit over 40 000 subscribers but it really is the next video from there where i noticed a tangible shift in his content really feels like quite an intense amplification i guess now this is where i'll point out that obviously up until now everything's actually been like really positive observations why did i open up insinuating that i have negative feelings about zach well to be honest up until just past this point in the content i've reviewed so far i wasn't very aware of his channel he wasn't really on my radar up until i'm going to be guessing our next session as you've seen so far his content has been evolving quite rapidly so does it evolve into a place that eventually made me have some weird negative feelings that i couldn't quite put my finger on we'll find out it's clear to me that at this stage is far more interested in targeting a broad audience with lower expectations of his talent but who were engaged by his content style instead of the art community which he was building and developing earlier on again these are not negative observations they are just observation a lot of these could be leveled at me 100 sometimes i tackle big art projects and a lot of the time youtube's demands for frequency means that that takes a backseat to something a little more reactionary the problem of course is when that gets out of control which i think from this point it starts to starting off with the injury there was an incident unfortunately zach had a serious injury right when he hit around 100 000 subscribers he got carpal tunnel and could no longer draw an emotional video where he announced via the title why i quit every artist's worst nightmare except later in the video when he seems very uninjured and very youtubery and not very sad did you guys read the title well it's true i quit i quit making excuses let's go now i wouldn't be so readily voicing my skepticism where not for two things i know that later his video styles and thumbnails definitely lean on some of these let's call them fairly dramatic concepts or themes or hooks and two later in his career when it works for the content he's doing a lot more work than he ever did even previously with 24-hour streams 50-hour streams i'm going to attempt to draw for 100 hours straight this is where i start to get skeptical and start to doubt how uh upfront zach has been with us in his tiles and thumbnails how does the carpal tunnel claim hold up over time it emerges once or twice oddly between a good handful of videos where there is no mention of it no wrist strap shown and some intense drawings at times it threw me off so much that i found myself researching carpal tunnel while watching these videos to verify the legitimacy of his claim but it otherwise seems to be non-existent far too much of the content that heavily relies on the use of flexation of his wrist for me to totally buy the level of injury he's claiming especially in the very emotional video talking about his injury i got the injections earlier they just stabbed it into my back over here if you treat your neck in some form or fashion or by adjustment and your carpal tunnel symptoms get better you probably didn't have carpal tunnel syndrome he said he's working on my back to help my forearm symptoms begin gradually and then worsen over time a few more cross hatching lines over here oh oh oh sh you may also feel clumsy and have difficulty grasping small items today i'm doing the 10 hour speed drawing challenge this is gonna be one of the toughest drawing challenges i've ever done after that video it is not seen or discussed ever again that is gonna be the quickest recovery to a heavily broadcast serious injury i've ever seen now i'm gonna stop this train right here i can't watch any more zhc content and call out anything that could be perceived as an untruth without calling myself out because like i said any criticism of zack is actually a criticism of youtube and what youtube rewards so how have i succumbed to that in my last video i alluded to making a lifestyle sculpture i only showed the torso in the head i only sculpted a torso in the head in my chocolate sculpting video when i first moved to the studio and i only had half a day to record a video the thumbnail looks like i made something really good when really i made a janky looking cat in both hologram videos that i've done the holograms of the thumbnail are nothing like the holograms we experienced in the video in a video where i made art out of beads i said there were 50 000 beads the artwork didn't contain 50 000 beats i bought 50 000 beads in my two most recent drunk pieces of content some of the wine was grape teaser and some of the whiskey was apple juice i'm a filthy liar but also a father and i need to go home to my children but i think you can see a running theme here youtubers are incentivized to use an amplified hook to get the attention of people to start watching the video that is just the way the platform is now and that is one of the greatest conflicts that i feel because there are lines i personally struggle to cross and i have to work around the algorithm to get it to my core audience i think that all gets my point across youtube as a platform incentivizes dishonesty there's an interesting emergence in this period of something called the art alliance i couldn't find his original trailer to on youtube it seems to have been taken down but it's actually on facebook the value proposition as best as i can gather was for artists who had communities to get together and make content together but also bring the communities that they have together to participate in content alliance assemble on the surface sounds really cool i'm all for stuff like that in this phase there's one or two artist alliances videos that emerge but otherwise it seems to have dissipated into nothing the ones i saw consisted of other established youtubers contributing their time and skills to draw and review art for zach's channel no matter where i looked i couldn't see zack do the same on any of the other people's channels which reinforces my initial impression that the artist alliance was useful mechanism to have other people contribute to the majority of the videos that exist solely on zhc's channel i'll give you one guess which channel actually benefits from this dynamic over time zac zach gets the views and the monetization and the real call to action to subscribe the other people get a link in the description and mention that's fine but zach's really benefiting from this arrangement in this phase we can see the beginning of the giveaways as they start to escalate with the intense and rapid growth of his channel i am going to give all them away to a lucky winner you just gotta subscribe as usual you gotta click that little bell turn on the post notifications in fact the morris channel grows the more attention and emphasis to these giveaways and the calls to action to subscribe are given this is also the period of time where i had a little more communication with him there was actually i guess you could call it a collab right around his one-line art challenge where vex zac and myself and box office artists participated in a sort of like battle thing i'll give you three days to respond let me just go ahead and show you how a real art youtuber does things around here where i did say one of the things that i've said in my life that has aged most like milk so you think you're a king and did i hear you say you have an army because thinking that's time to step in into my territory because if you were a king then baby i'm your god and if you call that an army wait until you see my vanguard that one still stings that was all in good fun and we all communicated via email about making that happen and we were all on the same page and seemed to enjoy the process but after the fact and a few weeks later zach contacted me about doing a collab together i have a really good idea for a collab that follows the trend person to do the most x in 24 hours wins 10 000 of course for us it wouldn't be 10 000 but it would be the other person's artwork we can count how many we have at the end the loser sends the other person their ten thousand dollar piece of artwork it would have gotten clicks i'm sure but it made me really uncomfortable to self value my artwork at ten thousand dollars for the sake of more clicks now actually recently i sold all of my artworks to help fund the setting up of my new studio here which worked really well thank you all so much for your support not a single artwork sold for ten thousand dollars let alone ones that took far more than 24 hours to produce maybe it's actually better ours than me and that would be fine to accept but i don't think that that was the true angle he was coming from it was content first truth second i tried to respectfully reply that that felt a bit too clickbaity for me personally and also i felt we'd done the animosity thing i thought it would be fun to do something more as a team or showing camaraderie to even patch up the rift that was played out before to his credit he pivoted to more of a superhero themed thing where we drew each other or do something like that i thought it was a great idea we sort of bookmarked it to come back to we had a call booked which i attended and he didn't so that was slightly frustrating to be honest let's find no hard feelings he was very busy obviously he contacted me the next day and saying maybe we could brainstorm by email no problem in an effort to try and save the collab because i wanted to collab with this guy talented artist up-and-comer loved his style really interested to see if we could do something together i pitched something that he didn't show much interest in fair enough that's what finding a collab feels like sometimes he pitched his concept next which was to make one giant artwork using 10 000 markers one of every color from every brand which would be a crazy big amount again that's um i just i've i've done that since we had this discussion it's not 10 thousand markets it's not even close to ten thousand markers it did cost me seven thousand plus dollars to do in this video i thought it'd be a really good idea to show you which markers are the best and which are the worst by purchasing every single marker on the planet alcohol marker that is and unsurprisingly turned out to be the most expensive video i've ever made in for the penny for the pound a good thumbnail would be us up to the neck with markers which i feel like would be pretty fun and kind of screw around while making art since there would be so many markers and this was jarring for me uh because i wasn't yet aware that this is what youtube was zack was actually at the cutting edge of what worked on youtube he obviously was living and breathing content creation and the people who knew how to get clicks and he was doing that and that's what he was pitching to me i was a fool to not take it up except there's that part of me that just can't not be honest past a certain point i'm not calling zach a dishonest person but i am saying that the approach is taking is one that is fully incentivized by youtube as a platform which is why you've seen it become more prevalent because the people who leap on and act on that impulse first are rewarded most that continues and escalates a reward system that puts certain people in the spotlight above others relentlessly but i do struggle with the level of ostentatiousness and the removal from the approach to art and yet the presentation of it as art such as when he approached me later and invited me to paint a lamborghini in california definitely content who am i to say if it's art art is relative but that level of extremity and commoditization felt like it was doing something to the art community and the audiences of our content [Music] all right so i'm starting the next session something caught my eye in the first couple of videos where he's doing like a trailer to his channel do the videos you watch no longer make you cringe is the internet just too fun and entertaining for you he shot the laptop on me that's right he was talking about the internet being too entertaining but he was it was a fun little jabber himself what actually caught my attention was this it shows his channel feed at the time that he recorded this video there is a draw with jazza roast me diss track a collab we had with vex and myself where we were sort of like dissing each other but he he took a doubt i left mine out the only evidence of our collab is me being mean to zack we're all on the same page but his is gone this is a fun sort of time capsule actually you can sort of see uh what his videos were performing like at the time and what his channel looked like at the time just interesting worth noting if there's only one video on this whole page that is no longer on there why did you take it down zack that was that collab that was the only collab that we had so the only things up there that are part of that collab are the videos on my channel and vex's channel linking to your channel but there's no remnant of our collab on your channel linking to my channel let's be completely honest with you i look at this period of time with mixed feelings on the one hand zack's putting out content like the youtube artist rewind which seems really invested in the art community and really interested in showing it all in a really upbeat and positive light which is great on the other hand as time goes on it appears more and more that zach seems to be positioning himself to gain the attention of people bigger than himself to make himself bigger and forgetting the people who he outgrows but we'll get to that later sorry for all these intrusions there's all these things that keep catching me by surprises again this is right around the period of time where i was becoming familiar with zach but also not doing a lot with him it's been a while since there was an artist alliance video but there is one that sort of popped up it's fun enough video they're all doing art on zak's channel again it's not on anyone else's channel but that's not here nor there i was just taken it back by just like there's a little random cutaway jokes [Music] out of nowhere that feels a little odd in a completely unrelated video i wasn't still battling with him are we still battling is this the battle what's wrong with my flex sack my flex no good can we amplify this in post please gareth just don't include me saying that zack mate you bring out the worst in me speaking of flexing whether you appreciate mine or not zach was definitely working on his and it's at this point that money and designer clothing and giveaways start really taking a firm place in the output of the channel in his 197th video we're introduced to a version of zach that's a little closer to what we're familiar with we see our first apple watch on camera and the hair turns a shade of green that's going to eventually turn into the hair that we're familiar with zach starts taking out loads of cash at this stage in his career to just sort of show and throw and on occasion and if it looks good for him he seems to make a show of giving some of it away but that doesn't seem like the purpose of the cash the purpose of the cash seems to be to show that zack has cash i found a really interesting moment in this spider sona video where he's sort of improvising talking about himself if he were a spider-man person just sort of inventing his super powers i'll just let him speak for himself as to what the zack version of the spider signer is guess what he turns into spider-man except for the thing is this spider wasn't just any kind of spider this spider was wearing some expensive gucci and supreme on it so this was actually a hype spider once hyped spider discovered his new powers he started flexing on all his classmates and the people that once bullied him got flexed on so hard that they ended up in the hospital and that's one way he defeats his enemies is by flexing on them at the end of the day he's got money the thing about superman and those guys is superman had to earn his money tony stark had to build weapons for his money but hype spider just got bitten by a hypey spider and having a lot of money was just one of his super powers i think it's safe to say that at this stage in his career zack is pretty focused on some very specific things that's five thousand three hundred two one go we'll click on it what's up mr beasters i'm wearing the mr beast merch because i'm about to do something insane just like mr beast i'm not gonna stop wearing the merch until he notices me are you planning on getting it no mr beast if you're watching this i hope you're proud of me we're supposed to fake it for clickbait and views i want to do really idiotic things on youtube spend a lot of money do some insane challenges for you guys of course great art as well now i want to try and give him the benefit of the doubt here in his last sketchbook tour it's apparent that this guy has done art and maybe he's just done with it maybe he's done it so long that he burnt out of that while he moved into being passionate about creating content everyone's going to feel a bit different about it i'm sure there are going to be people watching this who think yeah i would do things i would make certain exchanges or let go of one thing to get fame and money and attention and i can't have a problem with people who seek fame and money and attention when that is a part of my pursuit of time the weird bit for me is how closely that's tied to truth and that's where it starts to get a bit yucky but i do feel like it's just started and i feel like it's gonna be part two of this video where we dive a bit deeper into that which is why i'm splitting it into two parts because that's a conversation i don't wanna rush and the more i thought about it through this whole very long process of going through all this content the more i realize it's gonna be important to take this break for my ability to be level and give zach a fair go as part of this i want to offer zach the opportunity to let his voice be heard in the next part so i'm actually going to contact zach zach if you're watching this i'm going to reach out on twitter and your email and i'm going to as thoughtfully and fairly as possible just put some questions together so we can just chat about some of the stuff at the end of me experiencing your whole journey i have about 68 videos left all right i gotta call it it's 20 past five in the morning i have spent an ungodly amount of time watching someone else's content in full and i'm i mean i'm more than halfway through but there's a good chunk left to go but like i said i'm taking a break i'll probably come back in two to four weeks simply because i want to come back fresh and i want to give this conversation time to take place both amongst this community please uh let your voice be heard in the comments down below because i will be reading them and also with people in the art community in particular i'd like to talk to zach if he's willing to talk to me about all of this stuff but until then it is time for me to go home i hope you enjoyed this video and all the work that was put into it there's a lot of exciting stuff coming on this channel and you'll see my sort of content in the next couple of weeks between now and part two so make sure to subscribe for that because i'm always going to do art and it's always going to be awesome

Channel: Jazza

Views: 4,283,813

Keywords: josiah, brooks, jazza, jazzastudios, animation, newgrounds, flash, humor, drawing, adobe, photoshop, Artist, Painting, challenge, funny, crazy, weird, draw, art, entertainment, hillarious, bob ross, zhc, zach, custom, customized, expose, exposed

Id: rmjKfO63GE0

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021