Open Your Yawp

I am guilty and you know it. Do not deny it. I am. Not only do I occasionally create little video blurbs (the pretty eye cartoons), but I watch other homemade videos. And I inflict them upon you, usually in the form of Esoteric Saturday material, featuring songs about hypnosis or celebrities who are known users.

And I am not alone in my guilt. At least once a week someone in my consciousness says, "I was watching youtube" or "I watched this video online." There is a whole new world out there and it involves homemade videos. Maybe we have just grown weary of watching someone else's idea of good programming or maybe it makes us feel connected, but user-generated video has become a serious source of entertainment and perhaps enlightenment. This maybe our chance, hypnotists and hypnotism devotes, to educate the public in a witty, home-grown sort of way about the good word of hypnosis.

There is a new show coming out called YawpBoxTV that will air in Dallas, TX. It will be a magazine style show that features popular home-grown videos. It is based on the web site YawpBox and the videos submitted there. Do you see the opportunity here - to create content that will go beyond the realm of cyberspace and also hit the viewing public? Content by the people for the people. It really is amazing if you think about it. No Hollywood/Bollywood money, no Pixar effects, just you and me or who knows who out there creating video for the television consumer.

Way back in the early days of home-grown video on the Internet, I remember watching anything that had to do with hypnosis. Some were good, some were really awful (but good in a sense that one could narrow down hypnotists that one might like to use or not), and some were inspiring. Though I do not do show hypnosis, I remember one in particular that did the old "stiff as a board" phenomena. You know the one - where the person being hypnotized is given a suggestion to become stiff as board (or a steel pipe in this case) and then their feet are supported by a chair as are their head but with nothing to support the rest of the body, and yet the body remains rigid? Amazing stuff.

So now is our chance, we can do our own videos promoting the positive aspects of hypnosis, not just the amazing phenomena as mentioned above. We remain in control of the content, no worries about misinformation (unless we ourselves blow it).

Lex and Terry, the host of this show are challenging us to make and submit a video in the Lex and Terry Challenge. There are several categories, many fairly silly, but really, humor is a great way to get a message across. Ideas we could do include YawpBox ads, "Show Us Your Yawp, Whatever That Means To You," or even "Yawp Tats - Best Tattoo Gets on TV! Show Us..." The latter could work for those of us doing anesthesia for tattoos. Just a thought.