YouTube Thumbnail Reflection – Hope Mitchell

For my YouTube thumbnail, I designed it like some of my favorite YouTube videos, which are movie reaction videos where the speaker is unknown and only appears through the voiceover, relying on funny video clips or typed comments for entertainment. I find that thumbnails for these types of videos almost always have a funny typed comment on it (almost as if it were a meme) with a funny image from the movie. Therefore, I tried to stick to those conventions for my own thumbnail, and I added an easily-read title for further explanation of what the video would be about. Along with that, I also made my thumbnail eye-catching with uses of yellow and blue colors, as well as by including Hailee Steinfeld, a famous actress. For my audience, I was trying to reach people who enjoy watching funny videos and who enjoy movies, so I catered to that by featuring the recognizable logos of Bumblebee and Herbie: Fully Loaded and adding a joke. However, another approach I could have taken would have been to theme my thumbnail as more of a movie reaction video by including a picture of myself reacting to the movie. Other than that, I could have done a split-screen comparison of the two movies, with a picture from each movie on either the left or right of the frame and a picture of me in the middle to emphasize the comparison. Overall, I think that either of these ideas or my original idea would have been good, but I find that I click on the meme-style thumbnails quicker than reaction thumbnails.