There is an influencer who overcame a sudden visual impairment to debut as a KBS anchor. Heo Woo-ryung (25), who runs the channel ‘Woo-ryung’s YouTube’, is the main character. He started his YouTube channel in December 2019 and posts calm vlogs of his daily life and videos related to blindness. In a world of sensationalized content, his videos bring comfort and hope to many people. His candid video “I didn’t realize I was going to be blind” has over 3.96 million views. He has steadily built his space into a channel with a solid fan base of 100,000.
Mr. He’s blind due to an acquired condition. He began to lose vision in his right eye in the lower grades of elementary school, and before he entered middle school, he lost vision in his left eye and was declared blind. “If you’re always looking for the cause, you’re always stuck at the age of 14 when you were blind,” he said. His dream of becoming a radio announcer stuck with him. What started as a way to pursue his goal of becoming a broadcaster has now become a way to make others happy. He recently realized his dream. Mr. Heo was accepted as a KBS News anchor with a disability and now anchors the daily news program on KBS News 12. Here’s a one-on-one with him.
KBS anchor Heo Woo-ryung, who runs the channel ‘Woo-ryung’s Video’. <Photo courtesy of YouTube Korea
-Who are you?
=Hello. I’m Heo Wooryung, a visually impaired creator who runs the YouTube channel ‘Wooryung’s YouTube’ and an anchor who was selected as the seventh KBS anchor with a disability.
-What inspired you to start YouTube?
=My dream has been to be an announcer since I was in the third grade of middle school. While attending a special school for the visually impaired, I accidentally started the broadcasting club at the suggestion of my teacher. I couldn’t read letters because of my poor eyesight, and I couldn’t read Braille at that time, but I did the broadcasting club while reading the script, and it worked when I memorized it. My teachers and classmates told me that I was very good at it, and I found out that I liked to communicate with people. I was in the broadcasting club until high school, and then I went to college as a media major, and that’s when I realized that I wanted to do broadcasting. I kept thinking, “What can I do freely?” That’s when I discovered YouTube, and I started doing radio, which I love, and trying to get my voice out there. YouTube is a very visual platform, so naturally, I started vlogging, and I’m doing a lot of different content now.
-What kind of content do you usually post?
=I used to do my own filming and editing because I was visually impaired, so I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do, and I got a lot of help from my non-blind friends, but now I have an editor and a PD, so I’ve expanded a lot more. I used to do a lot of static content at home, but now I keep thinking that I want my world to be bigger, so I’m trying to do a lot of traveling content, and I’m trying to show a lot of new challenges, and of course, my daily life is the centerpiece, so I keep showing little things like my day with my guide dog Whitey, putting on makeup, etc.
-How do you get your content ideas?
=I mainly get ideas from my daily life and contentize my experiences. I think of the “How do blind people apply makeup?” video that many people watched. Now that I’m a college student and want to decorate a little, I started applying makeup. I think this video is a good content that can solve the curiosity of many people. I also do a lot of situational content, especially shorts메이저사이트, which are fun, entertaining, and attention-grabbing in a short amount of time. In longer videos, I can talk about serious things and emotional things. I think I can convey different things in shorts and longer videos.
-What is your detailed content creation process?
=I find it difficult to shoot and edit on my own, so I meet with my partners and together we come up with an outline, write a script, and then we go to shoot. Before editing, I try to give them specific feedback: cut some minutes and seconds, subtitle some minutes and seconds, give them a framework, and they edit accordingly. Sometimes I’ll film myself, and sometimes the angle or the focus isn’t right, but I think that’s a really natural way to showcase me.
-What kind of subscribers do you have on your channel?
=I think it’s mostly women, and the age range is from teens to 30s. I think there are a lot of people who have disabilities like me, who watch because they want to learn more about disability, or people who didn’t know about me at all and came across it through a recommendation and thought I was having fun and subscribed! I usually communicate a lot through comments, but I recently held a subscriber event to celebrate reaching 100,000 subscribers after the coronavirus calmed down a bit! I spent time with my subscribers face-to-face, and it really gave me a lot of strength, so I thought I should work harder in the future.
Anchor Heo’s ‘Uryeong’s Video’ YouTube channel. .
-How do you bridge the gap between the content you want to create and the content your subscribers want?
=I’d like to do more of the radio content that I did in the beginning, but I think there’s a gap because it’s a little calm, so I’m trying to show a different side of me! Also, the content with my guide dog, Whitey, is loved a lot, and I love the videos with Whitey, so I think I’ll be able to show a different side of me when I appear on TV as an anchor. I’m looking forward to it.
-What has been your favorite moment since you started YouTube, and what hasn’t been?
=My proudest moment is when people tell me, “I get so much energy from watching you!” I never really thought of myself as an energy-giver, and I didn’t do anything with that in mind.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)