[March 03, 2013] High school friends find a forum with YouTube to showcase their video skills Tweet BETHANY, Mar 03, 2013 (Herald & Review - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Austin Holt enjoys horror video games for the thrill, and he likes to share that enjoyment through his own YouTube channel. In horror games, he said, the player doesn't have any weapons with which to defend himself as you would in most first-person games. All the player has is wits. "You are defenseless, and the goal of those (games) is that you try to reach the end of the game while avoiding what is lurking in the shadows," he said. "The fact that you are defenseless is what makes it so scary." He uses his computer and a program called Bandicam to record his game play or AVerMedia to capture Xbox play to share with, as he said, "anybody who's willing to watch." He's up to about 50 subscribers. Holt, a senior at Okaw Valley High School, is taking video broadcasting classes at Heartland Technical Academy, and his teacher Gayle Bowman said that he's so faithful he even attends class on days when his own school is out. At that class, he met Tyler White, a senior at Argenta-Oreana High School, whose interest is graphic arts, and together the young men are collaborating on a short film in which they will act out some of the scenes from those horror games. White, too, is an entrepreneur who has a Facebook page to sell his graphic T-shirts (www.facebook.com/BxFxG Clothing). He started designing shirts because he was inspired by the designs advertising his favorite bands. "A lot of the bands have these really cool designs," White said. "I started following some of the artists that would draw them and thought, 'Wow, that's what I want to do,' because I like music and I like movies and graphic arts falls into both those categories." The name of his brand, BxFxG, stands for "Big, Fat and Goofy" and the X's in between signify the "straight-edge" lifestyle -- that is, no alcohol, drugs or tobacco use and most adherents are also fans of hardcore music like punk, techno, heavy metal and indie rock. Most of his designs use pizza in some way because, he said, pizza brings people together. "We started a new channel (on YouTube) and (White) is contributing a lot because he is the main artist," Holt said. Both plan to pursue their passions in college. Holt plans to study game design, and White wants to continue in graphic arts. Both fields will require higher math and computer skills. "I really want to get my own T-shirt business because a lot of my favorite artists sell T-shirts all over the world," White said. "Maybe music videos and making band merchandise for the band making the videos." Without the tech academy class and the Internet, White said, neither of them would be able to work on their career skills and might never have realized they were interested in those fields at all. "The Internet is a wonderful thing," he said. [email protected]|(217) 421-7982 ___ (c)2013 the Herald & Review (Decatur, Ill.) Visit the Herald & Review (Decatur, Ill.) at www.herald-review.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]