By Enno Behrens, Summer Times Staff Writer
As every year, there are many creative students with hidden talents and different hobbies at Exeter Summer. One of them this year is Friedrich (Freddy) Henle from Düsseldorf, Germany, who is a YouTuber with 6000 subscribers.
The 16-year-old from Soul Dorm started making YouTube videos, as “FeshF” three years ago, in January 2016. He had already watched YouTube videos for a very long time and wanted to try it out, to make his own videos when he was 13 years old.
“I just enjoyed watching YouTube videos,” said Freddy. “I wanted to try it out and I had fun with it”. So he started making “Let’s Play” videos about the video game “Minecraft”, inspired by some German Gaming Youtubers. Later he added “Fortnite” videos and a facecam to his Gaming Videos. Today, he is mostly doing Real Life Videos, Challenges and Vlogs, also about his time in Exeter. He is cutting and editing his videos with Adobe Premiere Pro. He “learned it all by myself”, for example by Watching YouTube Tutorials or by just trying it out. Usually it takes him 3 to 5 hours to make a video “but it really depends on [what kind of] video I make.” Per week, he usually spends 10 hours on his YouTube videos, he said. He even got recognized on the street in Düsseldorf by a stranger once.
He has already published five videos about his time in Exeter. The first one was a vlog about his journey and arrival here; in another one he showed his followers his room and how he was going to live the next five weeks; in the third one, he shows how a usual day of a student at Exeter Summer works out. Another one was about the student trip to Canobie Lake Park in which many other Exeter Students were included too. Maybe you are in the video or can remember students taking videos on bus ride or in the park. You may find one of your friends in there too. In his last Exeter video so far, he met students in the Grill or around campus and teaches them some basic German expressions and sentences and lets them try to pronounce it. Maybe you will find one of your friends in this video too. Freddy said that one more video about Exeter Summer, will probably get published on the last day. Maybe you will get the chance to get in it too.
When he started making YouTube videos, his family didn’t really support him, “because they thought is was a waste of time to play computer games, but when they saw that I was having fun and actually like achieved something on YouTube, then they did support me.” He also did Live-streams alongside YouTube, which what he even earned money, but at the moment he only makes normal videos. “I don’t do YouTube for money or subscribers,” says Freddy. Subscribers are “just a number” for him. His goal for the future is “having fun” and not increasing his amount of subscribers, earn much money or become a star.
His equipment for making videos are a camera of course, a PC to cut and edit, monitors and sometimes a green screen, especially for Gaming Videos. But you don’t even need this basic stuff for publishing YouTube videos. “You could just do it with your phone practically,” Freddy says, so actually everybody would be able to do that.
Freddy tries “to not show my privacy” on YouTube, to not publish to much information about his person, but still, it’s not a big deal for him to show himself on the internet. “Off course you need to get used to be standing in front of the camera,” said Freddy, “but…if you film yourself, you don’t think about the people standing behind the camera, it just feels like talking to a camera.”
“It is making me an individual person and more self-confident,” says Freddy about the impact YouTube had on himself as a person.
His Channel is called FreshF, so take a look, maybe you will enjoy the videos or recognize somebody you know.