Lee Hardcastle

We had a visit from Lee Hardcastle! I was looking forward to this! Unfortunately he came in a bit unprepared and unprofessional. But actually his talk was really fun and engaging and told us a lot of interesting things!
Basically he first started stop motion when he was at film school. He didn't want to work in teams as he wasn't a very confident person. So he asked his tutor if he could just work on his own on a stop motion and they said yes! So he got some action figures and made a short movie with them! He showed us it and it was actually really good and funny! It was obvious he studies film because of the good use of lighting and shot framing etc. 
He went through with us where he went from there showing us pretty much all of his animations. He was explaining to us that we need to enter competitions lots and lots and chances are you'll only win 1 in 100 but you need to do it to get your work seen and practice. Share your work everywhere too so that more people are likely to see it. Lee has gotten work from his videos because people liked them so much that they asked him to do some work for them!
He also told us about how you make money from youtube. Apparently it used to be a lot easier for him because the way the site was set up was that short videos got put down the side as suggestions so his videos would often get listed. He even told us he made silly videos like 'the best alien encounter ever' (or something along those lines) just so people would be intrigued and watch them and from that he would make money! These actually strangely became his most successful videos. However now he says this has changed and the longer videos are getting suggested which isn't what he does so youtube is no longer useful to him. 
I did really enjoy having Lee Hardcastle talk to us about what he is done but I don't really feel its relevant to me as i am not into creating gory things and also I am more interested in the movement and making it look realistic and that is not what Lee Hardcastles work is about.