KevJumba: The YouTube sensation with over 2 million subscribers and more than 200 million channel views; participant in the 17th season of The Amazing Race; and, quite simply, a guy you may know as “that Asian kid with the goofy dad.” Kevin came to Carnegie Mellon Thursday to speak and premiere his movie “Hang Loose” to an auditorium packed with energized, cheering fans. As Kevin himself said, here at Carnegie Mellon he was showing his film “for the first time ever.”
Cue cheering of KevJumba’s ecstatic Carnegie Mellon fans.
It was hard to keep his fans from descending in swarms to ask for autographs. This is not bad for someone who got his start by posting a video on YouTube of himself dancing in his backyard.
Arranged by AB Lectures and ARCC (Awareness of Roots in Chinese Culture), KevJumba’s talk consisted of showing his film and answering questions about filmmaking, how he became successful on YouTube, what inspires and motivates him, and other things his fans couldn’t resist asking.
He first showed his film “Hang Loose,” directed by Ryan Kawamoto and co-written by Benjamin Arthur, Dante Basco, and Kevin Wu himself. The movie is about Kevin (Kevin Wu), an 18-year-old high school graduate who has just gone through a rough breakup. He flies to Hawaii for his older sister’s wedding and has an adventure with his future brother-in-law (Dante Basco) and his brother-in-law’s friends that risks his life and changes it forever. Imagine an accidentally-offending-drug-dealers and almost-getting-ones-balls-blown-off type of adventure.
Once the film ended, Kevin took his place in the front of the auditorium and asked, “So what did you guys think? Could you see this being a real movie in a theater?” The audience clapped its assent. “I’m glad,” he said. “This was my first time showing it so I was kind of nervous. I’m pretty much broke from this video. It was kind of like, ‘Let’s make a movie. Here’s my credit card.’” He explained that the movie was low-budget. “The actors I cast were my friends and were people who were willing to do it for free because they saw the vision and wanted to make it a reality. But hopefully it will start bringing in money and I can pay them.”
The first question posed at Kevin asked how to achieve YouTube success. “To be successful on YouTube, you have to be yourself,” he said. “The kind of person you are when you’re alone in your room in your boxer shorts singing to music and dancing. People watch you on YouTube because you’re real, because they feel a connection with you. If you’re just like, (emo hair toss) ‘Yo, I’m going to play this guitar solo…’ people aren’t going to watch you. They’re just going to think you’re a douche,” Kevin said.
He explained that he was first inspired to post on YouTube by others’ dance videos. In turn Kevin’s first YouTube video features him dancing in his backyard. “It’s really bad. Don’t watch it,” he said, as the audience laughed. “But I keep it up there to show where I came from. My first video got two comments that said things like, ‘Hey, this is pretty good. You should keep making videos.’ And I reallytook those comments to heart. And now more and more people are telling me to keep going. It’s all of my supporters that keep me going now. If I were to, say, turn to drugs and alcohol, I feel like I’d be letting a lot of people down.”
Another person asked if he would ever move away from YouTube as he became more successful. “I won’t forget where I came from,” he said. “I want to keep making free videos for you guys. I enjoy making three minute videos as much as I enjoy making long movies like ‘Hang Loose.’”
He said that it was incredibly rewarding to make “Hang Loose,” but that it was his most challenging creation. “First there’s the scriptwriting,” he said. “You’ll write the entire script, and then they’ll hand it back and say, ‘Do it again.’ So you make it better. And then they tell you, ‘Do it again.’ So you make it better. That’s weeks of work they’ll tell you to rewrite, just like that.” Then he explained that there’s pre-production, shooting, and finally, editing. “Editing is the most difficult,” he said. “There’s like 50 hours of footage, and you just have to decide over and over, which piece of this is the best? …You guys just look at this and see an 80 minute movie, but I see all the work that went into it, and everything we had to deal with.”
But despite the difficulties of writing and creating a movie, Kevin wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like to be in charge of the creative process,” he said. “I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want to be an actor, because if you’re Asian, you only get to play stereotypical math nerd roles. I want to create films that represent real people and who they are. And that’s way more fun and rewarding than playing a math nerd on a TV show.”
The question and answer session also included questions fans just couldn’t resist asking. One of them was, “What’s your favorite pick-up line?”
“My favorite pick-up line,” Kevin said, holding the mic in one hand and playing with the mic stand in the other. He looked down and said, “If you were a mic stand, I would…touch…you…?” As the audience laughed, he continued, “But no, I don’t use pickup lines. And I hope nobody else here does, either. Mine is just, ‘Hi, I’m Kevin. Nice to meet you.’”
It must have been every girl in the audience who replied with an “Awww…” while he looked on, surprised, and asked, “How is that cute?”
Then questions grew a little more intimate. A guy from the audience asked, “You are single, right? My friend here wants to know.” Kevin, taken aback, smiled and answered, “Oh wow, nice to meet you…” He quickly turned it into a joke. “Yeah, I am. But you know, I just don’t think long distance stuff would work out…Yeah, sorry…” Cue even more laughter.
But through the mix of serious questions about filmmaking and other questions from fans, Kevin left us an important message with his trademark honesty and self-deprecating humor: “Don’t do things for the money. If you’re really passionate about something, do what you love and it will work out.” That’s something we can all take away from KevJumba’s film and YouTube videos and his success story.