It would make sense, that since the channel is called Genevieve's Playhouse it should have some videos of its namesake - Genevieve! We posted a number of Genevieve's videos in order for fans to get to know her and see what a cute baby she was and adorable toddler she's growing up to be =). We recorded Genevieve playing with Tsum Tsum toys. She LOVES the Tsum Tsums that we got from the Mystery Stack Packs. She'll watch our video Tsum Tsum Blind Bags that mommy did, and try to copy everything mommy says and does! The best part of Genevieve's video is when she says about Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb - "It's a bird." I mean, who can blame her? It has a duckbill! Of course it's a bird!

The other Genevieve videos: Cute Toddler Falling asleep, Toddler plays and laughs with Ferret, Toddler with Rainbow Machine at Universal Studios, & Toddler playing on stairs with a balloon were all home videos of Genevieve. The one where she laughs at our pet Ferret, Miko was probably the hardest I've ever heard her laugh. She was just cracking up! The way Miko was running up and down the stairs was just too silly for Genevieve to stand =). The video at Universal Studios is a poor quality cellphone video, but I really like it, as you could see and hear the joy she was experiencing just playing with the different colors of the rainbow machine. She was in little girl heaven in that play area at Universal! The one where she's playing on the stairs is just Genevieve being Genevieve - the cutest little girl in the world and an absolute everyday-joy-bringer. Her falling asleep while watching her movies was super cute too, and it makes me laugh seeing her try to fight it =)

We did a number of toy videos in rapid succession in early February. The videos were: Guardians of the Galaxy Blind Bags, Disney Exclusive Zootopia Toy Figure Review, Disney Princess Sofia the First Blind Bags, and Nick Jr. Doc McStuffins Blind Bags. These were all very easy to make and a lot of fun too. The toy blind bag videos are always a pleasure, as the surprise is for us as well as the viewer. Of the four, I think the Sofia the First video is the best. The toy figures are extremely cute, we got a good variety from the blind bags, and Jackie did an awesome presentation for it. The Doc McStuffins video was good as well, but it is pretty disappointing that a Doc McStuffins blind bag toy series does NOT include a potential Doc McStuffins toy! You can only get her toy friends and not the main character herself! Pretty silly if you ask me. The Guardians of the Galaxy video would have been a lot better, except we got TONS of duplicates. We did get the ultra rare Rocket Raccoon though, so that was nice =). The Zootopia video was pretty easy as there were no surprises - you know exactly what you're getting. The Disney toy figures were amazingly well-detailed and I was very impressed. This video has done pretty well for us. It gets a fair amount of views, but the audience retention isn't where I'd like it to be. I think the problem is my annoying voice =( Oh well...

We did another Tsum Tsums Toys Variety Pack video, this time narrated by me. Our first one Tsum Tsums Toy Video, was narrated by Jackie. I loved these toys so much that I wanted to do a video of them too. Also, they're so popular that another video couldn't hurt. It went fairly well, but the end result is that kids preferred Jackie's version over mine, by far! I learned my lesson, and will let Jackie do most of the narration, at least for girl toys.

Count with Play-Doh Eggs was a big departure from our previous videos. The original idea was to fill up a bunch of balloons with confetti and pop them to reveal numbers, this idea was aborted (we still have the filled balloons in a closet waiting for use), in favor of play-doh surprise eggs. Each surprise egg has a play-doh number on it and is filled with M&M's and a surprise toy. The play-doh was very hard to work with and the eggs were particularly cheap so they refused to stay closed while applying the play-doh. The result was a bunch of lumpy egg-ish looking eggs that were somewhat passable. We recorded Genevieve counting from 1 to 10, but she was so adamant against counting at the time that they only good recording we got was while she was in the bath (causing watery background noises). Filming the video was very straightforward once the prep-work had been done (we didn't even need to make the cats go in the basement like we normally do, since the audio wasn't critical and could be redone if necessary). I had recently upgraded my editing software from Camtasia to Lightworks, and I was very excited to use the new software. Camtasia had gotten so frustrating to use as an editing software, because after each edit you make, it saves the previous version in the background in case you need to undo the edit. Now imagine having to do dozens of edits, each one slowing your computer down more and more until it is a lurchy piece of junk... The only solution was to do a few edits, save it, completely close camtasia, open it back, do a few more edits, and repeat the process. Also, now that our videos were higher definition, Camtasia would frequently crash during the rendering process if the video was longer than 7 or 8 minutes. Lightworks solved all of these issues and gave me a ton of new possibilities with editing, but the learning curve on the program is very steep. I got a little carried away in this video with some of Lightworks' effects, and applied an effect that sharped the image in a way that made the final video look a little jagged. The video turned out surprisingly well, and I only regret using the M&M's as they only complicated things, and added very little to the actual content of the video as I did not record in such a way that utilized them to their maximum. This was our first video to get 1,000 views.