Thomas and friends blind bag minis was our next video and it too was narrated by Jackie. Unfortunately we couldn't find any Thomas the Train themed decor to use, and we had a grand total of 0 Thomas toys to use as decor. We used to some beanie boos and drew a train track on the marker board to spruce it up a little, but it did not end up looking very dynamic and exciting. The toys were surprisingly great though. These toy trains are about $1.50 each and are by far the least expensive blind bag toys that we've found, but their quality surpassed most of the more expensive toys. For one, they have a lot of bright coloring and detail. They are also quite heavy and have numerous metal components rather than 100% plastic. The wheels spin very well and their natural weight helps them roll along quickly. The bags are marked with a code number on the back which determines what train is inside, so you can actually look up which train codes you are looking for and check the packages in the store to ensure you get the one you want. Doing this, we prevented ourselves from running in to duplicates. This video did not do very well though, and I think a more colorful background or dynamic setting would have helped captivate the little kid audience we were looking for on this one.

Hello Kitty Blind Bags was done by Jackie as well. She staged the set quite smartly with a Hello Kitty table cloth and some Hello Kitty stuffed animals that we had around the house. I think this is one of Jackie's best narrations, you can tell she really likes these toys. They were very cute and extremely colorful and detailed (as opposed to the Marvel 500 and Transformer figures we did in previous videos). Although you can only get Hello Kitty out of the bags, each one comes with a unique and well-designed outfit. The only problem in this video is the shadowy lighting which made some of the figures harder to see in the close ups. I thought this was a very good video, but audience retention for it is quite low, and I'm still not sure why.

Jackie did the next video Disney Tsum Tsums, and I have to say that these are probably my favorite toys that we've come across so far. They're super cute, stackable versions of well-known characters from Disney movies. This video went surprisingly well. We both knew all the character names and what movies they were from, so they were easy to talk about. We only had a couple of duplicates, so there was a lot of variety in the toys we got. Overall this video went very smoothly and has been fairly popular on our channel.

Our next video, Sing-a-Long Care Bears, seemed like a debacle right from the start. We couldn't find any care bear themed decorations to use (and we even visited Party City), so we just used some of Genevieve's other Care Bear toys for background. Okay so the idea for these toys is that if you have more than one Sing-a-Long Care Bear, they'll recognize each other and begin to sing with each other. Easier said that done! The two bears recognized each other just fine; Cheer Bear would say "Hi, Grumpy Bear" and Grumpy Bear would say "Oh, hi, Cheer Bear". So far so good. Then one bear would ask the other to sing with it. The second bear would sit there blankly, while the other bear just went off singing its song as if the other had responded. Then the second bear would chime in 30 seconds too late and they'd both be singing different parts of the same song. Then we'd turn the camera off and mess with them some and they'd work perfectly! So we'd turn the camera back on and NOPE - back to singing waaaay off from each other or not recognizing each other at all. We tried fully charged batteries and everything. This went on for over an hour and finally I was so fed up that we decided to finish the shoot another time. The next day, we picked up where we left off and made sure to put brand spanking new (like out of the package new), and - miracle! - they worked! I posted this video, sure that it was a complete failure. It has turned out to be one of our most successful videos and in terms of purely organic views it is our most successful video to date! I mean it's not viral or anything, but it was definitely a surprise to see that on some days it would get 7 - 10 hours of playback time.

We continued with my wife's idea to use a themed table cover in the back ground for our Frozen Vinyl Figure video. This video was particularly memorable for how frustrating it was! The figures refused to stand up and would constantly fall down at the most inopportune times. Sometimes it was like a domino effect as one figure would fall and take down five other ones. I think we could assemble a whole blooper reel of outtakes from this video for how many retakes we had. Also there were a lot of duplicates. When we finished the video we both felt that the result was sort of boring, but we posted if anyway (extra videos can't hurt). Apparently youtubers felt the same way, because this video is one of our least-viewed. =(

Jackie, my wife, narrated the next video: Minions Blind Bags. She found some clever decorations at Wal-Mart: a Minions themed table cloth to use as a background, and a Minions mailbox to put the bags in. The video ended up looking a lot better than our previous forays. We got a lot of duplicates in this video which kind of sucked, but I was very happy with the end result and had high hopes when we posted it. The views just didn't come though, and it was a bit disappointing to see our best effort yet turn up nowhere in youtube's search engine (or on the 10th page or something).

I did our next video which was Transformers Tiny Titans blind bags. I brought up some of my old transformers from the basement as a kind of decoration. I even assembled my old childhood favorite: Devastator which was a lot of fun =). We got a good variety of Transformers in this run, but still there were a number of duplicates (do we really need 3 wreck gars? haha). I make the huge mistake of claiming that we've opened all of the packs when it's pretty clear that there is one left still in one of the baskets - the error was due to my habit of looking through the view finder of the camera rather than the actual toys. The viewfinder is very small and the background items are hard to see. I have learned that it is actually quite difficult to look at what your filming while making sure that things are in-frame on the camera. Hopefully it's a skill that will develop as we get more experienced! It all worked out though; I realized my mistake and opened the last blind bag and - what luck! - it was Optimus Prime! Perfect end to the video.

Marvel 500 blind bags was our third video, and I narrated this one. My voice over is a lot better than the last one, mainly because I realized with the type toy we were opening, the kids would be older and I didn't have to baby talk. Plus, I'm a pretty big fan of the Marvel Universe. I did a little research and noticed that other videos of these toys showed that many of the figures had a hard time standing up, so I decided to put some white play-doh down in order to stand them up in (I'm not sure if this was a good idea, because even though it worked, it looked kind of shoddy). The shaky camera is still there (really bad). Youtube can "fix" shaky cameras, but sometimes the fix is worse than the original. This was a fun video to do and I was very happy with it. Also, I finally figured out how to do higher resolution videos with my camera (which is great because I was thinking of buying a new camera to replace my old "hunk of junk" that we were using"). Unfortunately the toys are very cheap and not very popular =(

Our second video, Glitter Care Bears Blind Bags, was narrated by my wife. Her on-tape voice is much more pleasing to listen to than mine! We had already gotten Genevieve some of these toys before and we knew she loved them, so we decided to do a video opening some blind bags (plus they were really inexpensive < $3 a bag). At this point, we do not have a tripod and are just sitting the camera down on a few books, which causes a major problem with shakiness in the video. Anytime the table moves, so does the camera. The plain white background was pretty boring, so we decorated it w/ a few Care Bear stuffies and it helped a bit. I really like how this video turned out. It could use some editing (there's a lot of shots of my wife's arms), but the only real drag about it is the very low resolution.

We published our first video on January 8th 2016. It can be viewed here: McDonald's Retro Happy Meal Toys. Okay, so the idea here was to take a toy that we already had and was opened, so that if I made mistakes during the recording, we could just reset the shoot. You can tell in this video that I am not comfortable speaking in front of (or behind) the camera. My heart is racing for no reason at all. When I rewatch it, even just a month later, I cringe at how I am speaking to the audience. I speak as though I'm talking to tiny children. The video is lo-res as I had not yet figured out how to edit and render my video in a higher resolution. The editing software I used is Camtasia, which I soon abandon for superior software designed expressly for editing video.

This is actually not our first video. My wife shot our first video opening bags of Shopkins glow light toys. Unfortunately, there are only 5 to collect and we ran in to so many duplicates that the video remains unpublished and pretty much unusable.

After seeing our two year old daughter, Genevieve, take such delight in watching kid-friendly youtube videos, my wife and I decided to start our own Youtube channel. Our channel is called "Genevieve's Playhouse" (naturally) and focuses on opening and playing with toys. Our house is so filled with little kid toys, that it seemed to make sense to put some of these things to work for us!

In this blog, I will try to detail our journey; the hardships, and successes that we find along the way. And hopefully share the fun that we are having creating what is, essentially, an expensive hobby =)