From Variety · Isabelle Farina · · 1m 20s
He spent 14 years on YouTube to reach TIFF
Mark Vins built a 22 million subscriber wildlife channel as the long road to one feature film.
In brief
Mark Vins built a 22 million subscriber wildlife channel as the long road to one feature film. Short form work can be the training ground for the thing you actually want to make, if you know what you are aiming at. Originally reported by Variety.
A wildlife channel at scale
Mark Vins hosts "Brave Wilderness," a YouTube channel with almost 22 million subscribers built on outdoor content for a global audience.
Fourteen years of uploads
He has been making and sharing short form outdoor video since 2012. That run is the backstory to everything that followed.
From short form to feature
Vins has now made his first full length documentary, stepping out of the upload cycle and into a single long piece of work.
Premiering at TIFF
"Reef to Ridge" debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, putting a YouTube creator's first feature on a major festival screen.
The feature was always the goal
Vins told a TIFF panel audience that a feature film was his end goal from the start, and that years of uploading were how he planned to get there.
“Vins' end goal as a content creator was always to make a feature film”
Variety and YouTube on stage
The conversation ran as part of the YouTube Creators panel at TIFF, hosted by Variety in partnership with YouTube.
The short version
Short form work can be the training ground for the thing you actually want to make, if you know what you are aiming at.
