YouTube is a website widely known to the public and it has given two Winona State University students the ability to reach an audience that would not have been possible without it.

Winona State students Harrison McCormick and Christopher Schroeder have YouTube channels they upload and share their videos to. Both students share a passion for video-making and the platform has been a key tool in expressing their creativity.

McCormick’s YouTube channel is called Adequately Explained. His content focuses on pop culture references, rappers and memes.

“A lot of my videos center around the hip-hop community and the hip-hop culture. If there’s something controversial going on, even like a joke or a meme, then I try to make that,” McCormick said.

One of McCormick’s favorite musical groups is Migos. They are a relatively new rap group that have gained a recent following.

The highest viewed video on McCormick’s channel sits at about 700k views [at the time of this writing] and showcases an interview with Migos. The video is called “We don’t smoke weed.”

Harrison said he is unsure why the video is as popular as it is.

“There was a news article floating around at the time. The group got a random question which was, ‘Which one of you is the most powerful weed smoker?’ It was kind of a joke because their response was just a simple no,” McCormick said.

Other people have since downloaded the video and re-uploaded it under their own accounts, which McCormick said is frustrating because it is copyright infringement.

Another one of the Adequately Explained rap culture videos is titled “Lil Pump does Math on Sesame Street”.

In the video, Sesame Street characters are shown but instead of the characters speaking there is an audio overlay of Lil Pump rapping lyrics related to math. McCormick said many of these videos relate to modern pop culture.

McCormick passion’s for making videos started 10 years ago. He is currently a creative digital media and film studies major at Winona State, which he plans to use in conjunction with his video making.

When asked which of his video he considers his best, McCormick talked about his Lil Pump Instagram post.

The video is based around the relationship between pop culture and the media. In the video, his commentary focuses on his frustrations with news organizations reporting pop culture events McCormick said can be taken out of context.

Later in the video he makes light of this by dressing up as the rapper Lil Pump and making fun of how a silly post gets blown out of proportion by the news media.

“At the end of the video I had a fake rapper, played by myself, where I made a fake video to make a point out of it,” McCormick said.

McCormick was enthusiastic about his video content and expressed an interest in continuing his work after finishing school.

“I think I will probably still upload videos, just not as often. I hope to get into commercial work. YouTube doesn’t really help pay the bills,” McCormick said.

While McCormick focuses on rap-related humor and memes, another student focuses more on his personal life and making video logs with life updates, also known as vlogs. Schroeder has a handful of channels, but his main one is called PrimeTimeChriz.

“I have three channels, one is my personal channel where I talk about personal things and that’s called LifeWithChrizzy,” Schroeder said.

On Schroeder’s personal channel, he shares his thoughts on many different topics like politics, life at college and personal life updates. In one video, Schroeder reviews of what he has accomplished for the past year of 2018 and talks about some of his goals. In, “Goodbye 2018,” he reviews some of his low points in the year and the stress related to school, but shares his passion and dreams for the future.

Schroeder’s passion for video making started early on while in high school and since then he has uploaded more than 100 videos to YouTube.

Schroeder talked about the start of his passion for video making.

“Once I knew where I wanted to go to college, I started creating ideas of videos that I wanted to do. By senior year of high school, I just made a lot of videos and pursued that,” Schroeder said.

Schroeder makes a variety of videos and one of his focuses is ncomedy. One video titled, “How to eat McDonalds” consists of him enthusiastically going to McDonalds and purchasing a burger.

“I’ve decided that my main channel will focus around comedy because I do a lot of skits and people like those videos,” Schroeder said.

One of Schroeder’s proudest accomplishments is one of his most recent, called THE FIRST SPARTAN (MOVIE).

The movie is centered around the video game Halo. The story takes place in a futuristic setting where a future humanity must defend Earth from an evil alien empire called the Covenant.

Schroeder is a film studies major and said after college he wants to do something related to film creation.

“It’s what I always wanted to do as a kid, I want to be an actor and filmmaker, so it’s perfect that I take what I learn in class and apply it into the real world,” Schroeder said.