So our first post of the year is going to be kindy ramble-ly but our hands were trying to record the flood of memories flowing out of our mind and somewhere along the line the structure got a little muddled.
During the early 2000’s we would be fully immersed in our fantasy world which were primarily centered around our favorite shows at the time; Sailor Moon, Mew Mew Power & Magical DoReMi & Code Lyoko. This would also spark our love for writing and acting as when we were “trapped” in middle school, we filled the boring times with writing fan-fics before moving on to creating our own series; Elementz.
On the gaming side of things, we enjoyed games like DBZ Budakai with our step-siblings but the games that got stuck in our hearts were Ape Escape, Crash, Spyro, Double Dash, Billy Hatcher, JSRF, Mario & Luigi Partners in Time, Mario Party 7 and Super Princess Peach. You can imagine what we were doing when our dad bought us rollerblades one year.
However during the late 2000’s when we moved back in with our grandmother around 2005, which came with the benefit of having the house to ourselves a few times a week. This would grant us opportunities to act out scenes from our favorite games, cartoons as well as other ideas from our personal writings. It was also during this time that our original dream to act was born and replaced our more cursory dream of becoming an astronaut due to our love of Sailor Moon.
This would continue while adding W.I.T.C.H to our fantasy world but in 2006 we would discover a site that would give us a platform to experiment with actual “film-making”. That would be Youtube. While planning what our first piece of work would be, we would enjoy and incorporate ideas from the following games into our projects; Pokemon Battle Revolution, Mother 3, Mario Party 8, Pokemon DPPt, Mario Kart Wii, Brawl, The Mario Galaxy Duology, Mario & Sonic Olympic Games and Arc Rise Fantasia just to name a few.
While we used Youtube during 2007 for things like watching videos on Final Fantasy III/IV DS, we didn’t create an account until May 2nd 2008 known as 7ElementzHeroes. Interestingly enough and by this point, there were 8 Heroes that used Elementz but since 7 was our favorite number, we combined the twins into one with the justification that this would reflect our true self. That and in rev1 the eighth member; Drenee, didn’t actually exist. Okay, tangent time over.
With our Youtube channel created we were ready to start uploading videos. However we didn’t know how to go about posting our first upload so we uploaded a test video. Thankful our old silver Motorola Razr had a camcorder that could recorder up to 15 seconds of video. So what was our first video gonna be. Well on the hot afternoon of our channel creation, we posted this gem:
Yeah, just a video showing off my addiction to SoBe at the time. Nothing special now but it was quite novel at the time as Youtube was still new so I was easy impressed.
From here we would start posting video game content with voice-over to try to find our style. While doing that, we were working on multiple Elementz-related projects in the background including one that we consider our best work on the channel: That being us protraying the leader of the Heroes; Ryon doing things like displaying his gag of waking up by falling outta bed as well as training and engaging in battles with his Burly Stick in the fictional game of “Elementz RPG” on the Wii.
It feels a bit embarrassing in retrospect but we love that we have a time capsule of images and video from what we consider the best period in our lives. We just wish we didn’t fall off once we graduated high school and struggled to adjust to adulthood. Even now, part of that still exist in us but is going to be a bit more difficult to achieve with where we are in life.