10. Brock Baker
YouTube channels: McGoiter, McGoiter2, BrocksDubs Brock Baker is the "man of a kajillion voices." Watch Baker's videos and you'll see just how good he is at doing impressions. Baker has a series called "Celebrity Hate Mail", where he reads hateful comments people have left him and does impressions while reading them. I highly recommend you watch his video, "Bane Plays Slender"; it is quite hilarious. I actually got the chance to interview Mr. Baker, and here is what he had to say:
PM: How did you figure out you could do so many voices?BB: It kind of just...happened. I grew up watching a lot of TV, and would innately imitate whatever was on. It wasn't until I was about 13 or 14 when I realised what I was doing. I remember watching Scooby Doo and imitating Shaggy just out of the blue, and it freaked me out. "Did that come out of...me?" From there I went on to see what other voices I could do. Over the years, I have narrowed a list down to about 400 voices.
PM: Why/when did you start posting videos to YouTube?BB: Well, I originally went to college for animation. I always wanted to have my own cartoon and do voices for it. I still do. I ended up hating it since a good majority of what they taught was 3D animation, and I wanted to learn traditional 2D stuff. During that time, I took a video class and absolutely loved it. I was always a funny kid and always wanted a video camera to capture my stupidness, so I went out and bought a cheap camera. At the time, this thing called YouTube was fairly new. So I signed up with a stupid username that I now regret...McGoiter, and just started uploading stuff I made at school. People started watching and commenting on my stuff, and it just blew me away. That was about 7 years ago, and I'm still at it.
PM: Did you ever in your wildest imagination believe that you would be doing this as a job?BB: Absolutely not. When YouTube started, there was no way to make money off of it. I would just post impression videos in hopes that people would see it and hire me for stuff, which has happened. But making YouTube videos for a LIVING? I had no idea. I remember when YouTube introduced the "partnership program" where you could make money, so I signed up. I couldn't really make a living off of it until my "Friday" dub went viral...3 years later. That was a game changer. I always worked a day job and made YouTube videos with the rest of time until that happened. Now I'm doing it full time.
PM: If you weren't doing this, what do you think you would be doing?BB: I really have no idea. I would imagine voice acting, or maybe I would have just stuck with animation.
PM: If you could lend your voice to any TV show, which one would it be and why?BB: Probably The Simpsons, because come on, it's The Simpsons.
PM: How/when did you first get the idea for "Celebrity Hate Mail?"BB: One of my videos "Christopher Rappen" was FEATURED on the YouTube front page, back when they still did that kind of thing. The video was basically a "rap" that I wrote about and starring Christopher Walken...and people HATED it. Well, okay about 1/3 of the comments were just...mean. It really got to me. This is something I thought was funny, and spent a lot of time on it, and it really kills it when other people don't think it's funny. So I copied and pasted all the comments and just posted on Facebook to kind of laugh at it. Then I got the idea to READ them all in a video AS Christopher Walken, but no, people wouldn't like that. What if I mixed Walken in with a bunch of OTHER celebrities? So I just called it "Celebrity Hate Mail", never thought of making it a series, and people really liked it. I'm taking the worst negative comments and turning into something funny, turning it back on whoever wrote it and rubbing it in their face that I'm making money off their hatred. Muahaha. I'm now working on the eighth one.
PM: Are there any YouTubers you would like to work with that you haven't already?BB: Definitely. Britanick, Neil Cicierega, Olan Rogers. They're all brilliant. I'm pretty much friends with most of the other YouTubers I like.
PM: I love your Vines, I've watched all of them. How different is Vine, as opposed to YouTube, as a creative release?BB: Vine is instantaneous. I think of stupid short jokes all the time, and now I can CAPTURE them and send them out to the world within seconds.
PM: How great is it going to things like Playlist Live and VidCon? It must be great getting to meet your fans.BB: It's so fun. I'm still shocked that people find me funny. It's always good to hear that I inspire people.
PM: Thank you so much for your time.BB: Thank you!