Last spring, students lined up in the HUB-Robeson Center in order to see David Dobrik take the stage.
Shortly after tickets were sold out within the hour, Penn State decided to go online for the spring semester. As we are still amidst the hybrid learning for Fall 2021, David has not been able to visit campus.
Instead, the Student Programming Association, or SPA, planned a Zoom meeting with David Dobrik and live-streamed it to the students. The moderator was a YouTuber from Penn State, Sydney Ascenio. Sydney is a junior supply chain management student with over 600,000 YouTube subscribers.
David and his assistant, Natalie Mariduena, sat and talked with Sydney about many different topics spanning from the best give away he has ever done, to their biggest fears.
The question that everyone had been looking forward to was, “When will the vlogs come back?”
David’s answer was very vague, “If I had to guess, they would come back around the New Year,” He says that seeing people with masks is sad and scary and he doesn’t want to capture that in his vlogs.
Dobrik also goes through and explains how his videos are made. He says there is about five hours of content for each video, but when asked how he balances filming and spending time with friends, he explained that it isn’t always what you see in the vlogs.
“A lot of what we do is downtime. It’s hard to explain to people my friends aren’t insane…we will sit on our couch for four hours a day and be on our phones and we won’t even look at each other,” Dobrik says.
He also explains that there is a strategy behind editing the vlogs and even makes the point that, “If you cut the movie Titanic down to four minutes, you could make a comedy.”
Some other funny parts of the Q&A segment were asking David what “side” of TikTok he is on. He said right now, he has seen a ton of military surprise videos on his For You Page.
Ascenio then asked him if he thought TikTok was better than YouTube and Dobrik’s answer even shocked Mariduena, “I think it is better. I can go on TikTok and find videos that make me laugh before i can even find a video to watch on YouTube.”
Dobrik also promised to try and come to a Penn State Football game when Coronavirus is all over. He said that sometimes it is scary to come to a college town because everyone he sees wants to do something crazy for the vlogs, however, if the Jonas Brothers come, he will be here.
Penn State, let’s make it happen!
