YouTube SuperStar

The latest mysterious internet web sensation is a karaoke singer known as ysabellabrave. She has a couple of dozen videos on YouTube where she sings old showtunes or torchy songs from the big band era with a smattering of classic rock tracks. She interprets the songs rather broadly and has huge expressive doe eyes. Her hair color ranges from brown to an allegedly natural blonde.



On digg.com and other places, there is a fair amount of controversy about whether Maryanne/ysabella is genuine or some sort of Astroturf creation like lonelygirl15. On the “genuine” end, the technical quality of the videos is definitely amateurish. Each song is a single unedited take done by a webcam. The only lighting is a desk lamp that she points right at her face. In some videos, if you look closely, you can see the standard YouTube issue messy bedroom in the background.

On the suspicious side is the quality of the singing. She claims to have never sung publicly until a year ago, but she has all the lyrics well memorized and her little vignettes are cleverly rehearsed. She has access to a pretty big library of karaoke tracks to sing along to. Those things aren’t cheap, and that is ostensibly the reason for her Paypal donation button. Also, the complete lack of personal detail about her is curious. In this let-it-all-hang-out MySpace/Xanga world, the only info about her outside of her fan-run webpage is a LiveJournal account that is heavily Christian themed.

She also claims to be an American Idol reject. This is perfectly plausible, since the show likes to focus on the future contestants and the abysmal train wrecks. Maryanne has a very nice voice, but her videos lean away from the poppy ballads Simon and the gang seem to want. My verdict is that I’m still suspicious, but I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt since her story seems to be internally consistent so far. I wanted to know how easy it is to duplicate her video format.

My singing talent is, at best, sorely wanting. Most everywhere I go, I eventually get banned from singing, particularly at home. Only once has anyone ever requested I sing. In high school I worked at a Wendy’s and one of the guys there loved to get me to do my particularly tuneless version of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”. I knew he was laughing at me and not with me, but I liked the attention.



Thanks to the miracle of the intertubes, the pain and suffering associated with hearing me sing is no longer restricted to family, friends, and coworkers. My voice can now annoy complete strangers anywhere in the world.

My other YouTube videos have been edited from camcorder footage or compiled from photos slideshow style. For this video I tried out the movie function on my new pocket digital camera, a fairly inexpensive Canon A540. What you see here is one hour’s worth of work on a weekend morning. I took three takes altogether, mostly getting the camera placement right and setting the zoom setting correctly. Like ysabella, I used a desklamp pointed at me to avoid the zombie eyes common to most basement filmed lipsynch videos.

I tried to sing along to a midi-track, but I couldn’t stay on tempo, so I went completely acapella. I usually don’t get much past the first verse before people shut me up, so I printed out the lyrics which you can see me looking over at. Even then, I still flubbed the second to last line.

Maryanne claims to have no editing software. The raw 640x480 footage from my camera was 300MB, so I had to use Adobe Premiere Elements to shrink the .avi file to a more manageable 30MB .wma file suitable for uploading. Since I was in Premiere anyways, I went and added a title since that is one of the few things I know how to do. Otherwise, what you see is what you get.

Unless I achieve some of William Hung level of notoriety, this video will hopefully remain obscure. At best (or worst, depending on your point of view), someone in the real world will recognize me and use it to tease me mercilessly. While I have successfully demonstrated that any idiot with little equipment can get a video shot and uploaded, it still takes some talent or lucky break to get noticed. Maryanne, whether or not she is a real person, clearly has more talent than I can ever hope to have. Good luck to her, and if you watched all three minutes of my ear splitting caterwauling, my apologies.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Share your talent or point me to somebody even worse than myself.