Draft:Austin McConnell

Gregory Austin McConnell (born February 15, 1990) is an American filmmaker and YouTuber. He started his career producing indie films but is best known for producing videos on his YouTube channel. He produces videos on various topics including popular culture, filmmaking, his personal experiences and other general interest subjects. As of April 2021, his channel has 1.28 million subscribers and 139.6 million channel views. In 2018 he was nominated for a Shorty Award.

Early work
His early filmmaking first gained recognition at SATO 48, where he has received over a dozen awards for his short films.

In 2010, McConnell went on to become the creative lead and director of LG15: Outbreak, a web series part of the lonelygirl15 franchise. McConnell won the commission for the series after producing a series of videos criticising the show, figuring he could "do a better job".

Sprouting Orchids
In 2014, McConnell released his first full-length film, titled Sprouting Orchids. The sci-fi movie follows the story of a young man and woman recovering from separate tragedies while "unseen forces in the universe work to bring them together for a purpose far greater than themselves," according to the film's IMDB summary. Sprouting Orchids was screened at film festivals and briefly select cinemas in Germany. McConnell later talked about his experiences working on the film in a YouTube video, released in October of 2017.

YouTube career
McConnell produces videos in a wide range of genres from film analysis, educational videos, digital storytelling and video essays. In a 2019 interview, McConnell said he uses his channel to "tell stories or talk about things I find interesting" and would dislike it "being pigeon-holed into a particular genre". As of December 2023, his channel's total view count of its public videos is 191 million.

McConnell created his YouTube Channel in June 2007, and for the first several years he mainly uploaded his short films. McConnell says his first video to reach a widespread audience was his analysis of the book Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2016 and credits it to the early growth of his channel.

In June 2016, McConnell released one of his most popular videos, promoting the idea that the printer ink cartridge industry is a "scam", explaining various techniques that printer companies use in order to make profits, such as false "low ink" notifications and blocking customers from refilling the cartridges himself, which received widespread media attention. In November of the following year, McConnell released a short video going over a 1940's Monopoly board made during World War II and how its material components were impacted by the war at the time.

In January 2018, McConnell released a short video talking about how the English alphabet at one point had 10 letters that have fallen out of use. In April of that year, he released a video advocating for diverging diamonds and asking for people to use their turn signals. In November, after reading the book Creativity Inc., McConnell released a video explaining the story about how an employee of the American movie studio Pixar accidentally deleted the digital assets of their then-upcoming movie, Toy Story 2. Later that year, he was nominated for the "Best Breakout YouTuber" category by the Shorty Awards.

On his YouTube channel, McConnell has produced multiple ongoing series, including Really Weird Star Wars, where he goes over lesser-known parts of the Star Wars franchise, and a series produced around every 6 months, that tries to feature interesting channels with under 1,000 subscribers.

Currently, McConnell is working on a superhero franchise titled The Superzeroes, taking characters and tropes from classic superhero comic books that have fallen into the public domain due to their old age. In September 2023, he produced an animated short film as the first entry in this project, The Sensational Cat-man, based off of the titular character originally created by Irwin Hasen and published by DC Comics in the 1940s, going into public domain after its copyright wasn't renewed in the 1960s. He started a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 to try to raise funds for a full-length Cat-man film, which succeeded raising the funds less than a month into 2024.

External link

 * Austin's YouTube Channel
 * Austin McConnell on IMDb
 * Austin McConnell on IMDb

Category:1990 births Category:21st-century American male actors Category:American male voice actors Category:American male web series actors Category:American YouTubers Category:Living people