Inside Toronto’s new YouTube Space
Free studio, opening this week, encourages viral video stars ‘to be more ambitious’
Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown rent a loft space in Toronto to shoot their snappy tutorials for AsapSCIENCE, a YouTube success story with more than five million subscribers.
Alas, their shooting schedule is often interrupted by the rowdily prancing neighbours in the dance studio next door.
“We have been fortunate enough to even have the money to create that space and it’s still not good enough,” Brown says.
He was one of the enthusiastic YouTube stars on hand Tuesday to cheer the opening of Canada’s first YouTube Space, housed at George Brown College’s King St. E. campus. When the 3,000-square-foot-plus studio space opens on Wednesday, it will be the ninth in the world, following Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Berlin and Tokyo.
The first wave of Canadian YouTube superstars such as Lilly Singh, Epic Meal Time and Gigi Gorgeous rode their fame south. But the personalities at the studio Tuesday consider the opening of Toronto’s space the dawn of a new era.
“We have felt a lot of pressure to spend time in L.A.,” AsapSCIENCE’s Brown says. “We don’t like L.A.”
“We’re where L.A. was four years ago,” Anthony Deluca, a men’s style vlogger, says of Toronto’s YouTube scene. “People felt like once you get to a certain size, it’s more advantageous to leave Canada. Having a space here and putting the emphasis on being Canadian is a really great reason to stay.”
The facility’s two studio spaces are free to use for anyone with more than10,000 subscribers on YouTube. When that magic number is reached, they are invited to a special “Unlock the Space” orientation session.
“Some creators want a black box to work with and others really want to be inspired creatively,” says Liam Collins, head of Americas for YouTube Spaces, which is why one studio in the Toronto space is empty with blank white-brick walls, 15-foot loft ceilings and pull-down green screens.
The other is a sensory-overload set inspired by renowned Toronto music venues, complete with a stage, bar, graffiti-mural by Runt that ech- oes his familiar scrawlings outside Lee’s Palace, and a campy Canadiana rec-room that includes a crokinole board, moose antlers and table hockey. But it’s not permanent.
“After we’re through with this set, whenever that is, it could be several months, we’ll strike it and do something totally different,” Collins says. He jokes that a taxidermied fish will go on his mantle.
Design students at George Brown contributed to the space, creating, for example, a pixelated mural in red, black and grey that symbolizes the Toronto streetcar (it’s also the same colour scheme as YouTube’s logo).
“We found in other cities that partnering with an educational institu- tion is really effective,” Collins says, noting partnerships in Sao Paulo and Berlin. “They have that creative community.”
The school will also use the studios as part of new courses that essentially teach students to become YouTube stars themselves. “Acting for media,” which focuses on performing in digital video, launches in September, followed by “video design” in January, which will cover subjects such as filming, animation and motion graphics.
George Brown also sees the studio as an opportunity for students to learn from the established YouTube gurus in the building.
Similarly, Collins says the space will become a melting pot for media old and new.
“We will definitely see all the media companies in town invited to work here,” he says. “We’ll have Bell here, we expect. We’ll have Rogers here. I’d love to have TVO come do something here.”
For AsapSCIENCE’s Brown, the best part is having a studio space that’s only an Uber, and not a plane ride, away.
“We are so happy and proud to know that we can stay here in this amazing huge thriving city and do what we want to do here,” says Brown. “I do not think of it as a stepping stone to L.A. This is where we want to be.”