Draw My Life - Rebecca Parham

hello my geeks and peeps my explainers and entertainers my little uh lollies Rebecca param here and oh my gosh I have to thank you all for the half a million subscribers you guys have helped make a dream I've had for the last four years come true. reality and I really can't show my gratitude enough, but I'm going to try to make a video that has been requested a lot, this is my official

draw

ing of my

life

, well, it will be a little bit of

draw

ing and a little bit of animation, but we. I'll just call it drawing my

life

for simplicity and just to clarify, this is going to be a broad look at my life without going into too much detail because I have a lot of stories that I want to turn into future videos and I wouldn't.

I want to ruin them anyway, let's jump into the complicated mess that is my life. Here we go, it was 1987 in the city of San Antonio, Texas, two army veterans who already had a daughter, Rachel, we are expecting another baby, my mother. and dad had just started a business together as partners and even had two employees to think about, but since money is usually tight in the early years of any business, my dad stayed to run the new company and my mom went out and got a job really. To make ends meet, she worked on those big giant computers from the '80s that were the size of a room and had magnetic tape drives and big flashing buttons.

Yeah, those were my mom's shoulder pads and everything anyway. On December 4, 1987, at approximately 2:14 p.m. I made my grand entrance into this world very loudly, I didn't even need to be pinched or anything, I just came out screaming, so yeah, I've always been that dramatic. They took me to our house in what was basically typical middle-class American. Small, neat houses in the suburbs, all in a row, with front yards and tall wooden fences, lots of neighborhood kids to play with, an elementary school you could walk to and from, and even a bully kid who lived down the street. complete experience of American childhood for six years.

It was just me and my sister, so one day Mom and Dad sat us down in the living room, showed us a children's book about babies, and said we were going to have a new little brother or sister. Rachel and I secretly wanted a brother and we broke up. fulfill our wish because shortly after my little brother David was born and he completed parameter five throughout my childhood, I showed interest in the creative arts, putting on plays in our living room for my parents and casting myself as The Star, My Sister is the supporting role and our stuffed animals are all the other parts.

He would use anything he could get his hands on to build sets, props and costumes, and it was a very early lesson in ingenuity and innovative thinking. My family also loved music and I started singing very early. I would sing any Disney song you wanted or didn't want to hear, but most of all I loved cartoons. I grew up watching Disney movies and shows on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, that's actually how it was. Nickelodeon showing behind the scenes of their cartoon shows during commercial breaks, gave me the initial idea that maybe one day I could be an animator, a dream I carried in the back of my mind for most of my life, but there would be many. years before I acted on it, when I was about to enter fourth grade, the family business was really starting and my mom went back to work full time as my dad's business partner, they were moving the family business closer to the country. side of town, which meant we had to move, and on top of all this, my parents enrolled me and my siblings in a new private prep school, you know, the kind that offers better education and wears uniforms, the school It was small and I mean small.

They had grades from pre-K to 12 and there were maybe 200 students total, which meant that you were stuck with the same 15 people in your class every year, the kids in my class, well, they didn't like me, I mean, I was So. A really strange and dramatic kid walking into a class they already knew each other, so I was meant to be the odd one out, but with how small the school was, it meant I was alone and my personality changed because of that, I went from being a be happy, spontaneous, shamelessly creative. as a child to a shy, socially awkward, overly emotional weirdo, and that's a recipe for disaster when you add puberty to the mix.

High school is a tough job for anyone at that age and, like many, it was when I developed major self-esteem and anxiety issues that I was bullied. a lot and the adults who ran the school didn't really do much to stop it. Oh and there was a strange social pressure created by staff and students not to pursue the arts as a career, particularly in acting, it's a bit hard to explain but the general consensus was that actors were horrible people and wanted to be one of the most horrible. Yeah, I don't know, it's stupid, but being the meek kid that I was, I abandoned all my dreams of being a Broadway star and momentarily spent years on my marine biology.

This was the phase in which I learned to dive. My mother was treated with me and we still love diving to this day. Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter. God rest his soul he was my hero in high school and I liked a lot of other dark nerds too. things like Pokémon and video games and while my classmates were watching adult shows like Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was watching shows like Eddie and Eddie, the Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog and Samurai Jack, not to mention I was one of maybe five plus size kids in the entire school and I think my worth as a person was directly related to my appearance and what other people thought of my body, well it was going to be a demon I would have to fight for a long time. a long time, but Don't worry guys, I finally won that war, so from fourth to eighth grade I was completely miserable in this high school, but when I was entering my freshman year of high school in 2002, I finally had enough and begged them to my parents to leave me.

I went to the local public school. This was the first time I experienced culture shock. I went from a heavily protected school environment of 15 people per grade to a school of over 2,000 students where I was periodically offered drugs and kids got drunk at parties every day. Another weekend was definitely not my thing, as difficult as it was to adapt that first year, it was also the awakening of my creativity, the school curriculum required art credits, so I chose two old loves of mine, theater and the chorus, and for the first time in a long time I just realized that's what I wrote in the script, sorry, but like I said for the first time in a long time I felt that joy, that passion, that spark for acting like that. new, but as some of you may remember, my high school drama club was where I met my person.

Vengeful, mentally unstable drama teacher, more about her in a later video. The theater kids were also a rough bunch, and although I was a contributing member of the club, I still didn't get along with most of them, so once again. I was the shy, socially awkward weirdo with no friends, but it was still better than high school. It was also my sophomore year when I started drawing for the first time in years. I mainly drew cartoons I saw on TV and some bad costume designs for theater. nothing I took too seriously, but it's worth noting now, when senior year rolled around, a certain event involving my emotionally abusive drama teacher happened and I finally decided I'd had enough of her in January 2006, I left the club In all his classes with the drama club I no longer had time for myself and I spent a lot of time at home on the Internet, where I dove headlong into the wonderful world of fandom and was up for all fan art, fanfiction, cosplay, role playing games. forums and that's when I really started drawing, I just buried my head in a sketchbook and a copy of Photoshop Elements six.

I posted all my fan art on deviantART. I calmed down and reveled in the fun I was having one day while tinkering around on deviantART. I clicked. on a random link someone had posted and sent me to this strange new website called YouTube after days of exploring this new Wonderland. I created my first YouTube account with the username Grizabella six to six and posted mostly fan-made music videos about my favorite. show at the time ed ed Neddy I'm pretty sure you can still find them floating around the internet, but I finally had to leave high school behind and look forward to college.

I was accepted into a local private college and chose to major in theater. I'm also joining the chorus for good measure as I continued to draw fan art and post it on deviantART and was even starting to explore my own original ideas for cartoon shows. After a year in the theater department, I came to the cold realization that theater probably wasn't going to work for me, so I talked to my parents about doing something different and finally someone suggested me. What about the animation? My mom was on board, but my dad needed some convincing that the talent was there, so I showed him a piece of fan art I had drawn of the grim adventures of Billy and Mandy and that convinced my dad to send me to the animation school.

Mom searched for schools online and found Ringling College of Art and Design on the Pixar website, although it's no longer there, they removed their list of schools we visited on campus and I showed her a Ringling advisor in my portfolio and oh my. Did you break a new one? I learned that I was going to have to make a completely new and much better portfolio to even have a chance to get in. I went back to college, quit theater for the second time in my life, and took nothing but art classes for a semester. I created the portfolio and sent it to Ringling a few months later, mom and dad called me in the middle of my painting class and with tears in their eyes told me that Ringling had called me and I was accepted in 2008.

I moved to Sarasota, Florida and I started my first year at computer animation school. I was in for a reality check because on the first day of school I was sitting down. next to a fellow freshman in animation and she started scribbling Disney-quality drawings in her sketchbook and I went back to my dorm and called my mom in a slight panic telling her that I couldn't compete with these kids, but She and my dad encouraged me to do it. I keep going and do the best I can and I had a pretty good time that first year, but the summer before my sophomore year my grandmother died, she was basically another mother to me after living with our family for 12 years, it was a loss. really bad for us, so I entered my second year already in an emotional mess to make matters worse, it was the first time we worked with the 3D animation software Maya and it took me a lot to learn it.

I barely made it through the first semester of sophomore year. but in the second semester I failed my computer animation class despite giving it everything I had and with the way Ringling's curriculum was set up, it meant that I was kicked out of the computer animation major entirely and I had to wait half a year to get the chance to go back to this. It was the biggest failure I had ever faced before and I felt completely useless, but my parents believed in me and told me that I could stay enrolled and try again in half a year, So while I was waiting to get back into computer animation, I took classes for my business major, the business students and professors were incredibly uplifting and supportive.

I felt very empowered and when I returned to major in computer animation that spring, I was confident and ready to excel, which I have done now all this time. In school I wasn't really paying attention to YouTube and how it was changing, but the summer before my senior year of school I rediscovered the YouTube scene and practically overnight I became a fan of many creators. At that time I also got on Twitter and started. Relentlessly annoying the first youtuber I subscribed to, Daneboe, it's pretty funny that we eventually became good friends and his success on YouTube was a huge inspiration to me, so much so that I started dreaming of becoming a youtuber too one day, but no one in My school thought it was a good idea, so I kept it to myself after all.

I was supposed to apply to big studios like Pixar and DreamWorks, making everyone proud anyway in the last year when I finished my thesis film and in 2013 I graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design with a bachelor's degree in animation computer and a minor in Art and Design business, at that time my plan was to return to Texas, rework my portfolio andresume some applications for major studios like Disney, Nickelodeon, blue sky, etc. and hopefully get a job and move to California or wherever the job took me, but things didn't really work out that way, my parents started encouraging me to start a business on my own, you know exactly what they did and don't get me wrong .

I love the idea of ​​that, but maybe later on not fresh out of animation school, I'd never worked in a studio before, but before you can say Bob is your uncle, my sister and I had combed with the name , let me explain the studies to you, my father helped me apply for the LLC. and suddenly I became a businesswoman I had no idea what I was doing so with the creation of my new company I decided to make a new YouTube channel to coincide with it and so on February 17, 2014 this channel was born let me explain studies like I didn't upload my first video until June 21, 2014, titled "Beef we a Pokemon parody." Now you would think this would be an exciting time for me, but in reality it was probably the most anxious and stressful time of my entire life because I wasn't away.

There I got great jobs in studios like all my friends from school. I began to succumb to what I call post-ringling depression. It's a real thing I've seen in some of my friends when they feel like they're not living up to expectations. That ringling they gave them is like graduating from Harvard and not being able to become a lawyer and everyone knows it. I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions and no matter what I decided to do with my future, I would do it. Being disappointing someone, my anxiety was really taking over and I felt this darkness starting to well up inside me like at any moment something was going to collapse.

It would overwhelm me and I would just break down, lose my mind and then on the 18th November 2014 at 9:30 a.m. m., dad had just left and started having chest pains in the middle of his morning meeting with his employees and when my sister took him to the hospital he had just gone to he died of a massive heart attack that he couldn't survive . I guess this should have been what tipped me over the edge and sent me into a dizzying depression, but surprisingly it wasn't weird enough, I think it had the opposite effect there. There were many factors at play, mainly related to the strength and courage of my mother and sister and the kindness and love that everyone else showed me, but what they had given me was the ultimate excuse to feel sad and no one He was going to judge me. for bursting into tears and saying how devastated, heartbroken and scared I was because everyone else was feeling exactly the same and that tugging on the emotional pressure release valve in my head was what saved me, but most importantly it taught me The loss of my father was that when you experience something that you previously thought you couldn't survive and you do, the world doesn't seem so scary anymore and you are always so much stronger than you think.

I took back my life and continued. to run my company, which was basically just me doing freelance animation and illustration work, but with better tax breaks and in my free time I made videos for this YouTube channel, which turned out to be the best therapy for two and a half years. Independent YouTube Videos and Independent YouTube and YouTube I created a small very friendly and loyal YouTube audience and also made some YouTuber friends and one day in January 2017 I came up with the idea of ​​putting some of my YouTuber friends in a video and Idea alternative satirical video that I had written maybe two years earlier called How to Scare Your Favorite YouTubers at Conventions.

I asked TomSka Daneboe and Jaden Animations to lend me their voices. They sent me the lines. I got to work and finished. the video just in time for the season on May 5, 2017. I uploaded to this channel how to scare your favorite youtubers at conventions and something happened. I started getting subscribers, a lot of subscribers in a very short time and just 2 months later. the night before I flew to VidCon 2017 I hit 100,000 and that was just the beginning, the numbers kept going up and up and by July 19, 2017 I emailed my last client for the last time and officially became a Full-time YouTuber Since then our community of explainers and animators has grown quite quickly.

I mean, as you can see from the beginning, this video was supposed to be a milestone for half a million subscribers, but you guys haven't slowed down one bit, so you know what this video is. Now just a big thank you to all of you, you are the reason I can wake up and do what I love for a living and you are the reason all the hard work and struggles were worth it so thank you, thanks for changing. My life, thank you for helping make a crazy dream come true and thank you very much for tuning in, but now I can disconnect, goodbye.