Hank Green

Not to be confused with William Henry Green.

Hank Green

Hank Green at VidCon 2014.
Born William Henry Green II
(1980-05-05) May 5, 1980
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Residence Missoula, Montana, United States
Alma mater
Occupation YouTube Vlogger, Musician
Years active 2007–present
Known for Blogging, vlogging, VidCon, green technology, singing
Notable work VidCon, VlogBrothers, Project for Awesome, 2D Glasses, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, SciShow, Crash Course, DFTBA Records, EcoGeek, and Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers (band).
Spouse(s) Katherine Green (m. 2006)
Relatives John Green (brother)
Website

William Henry "Hank" Green (born May 5, 1980) is an American entrepreneur, musician, educator, and vlogger, known for his YouTube channel VlogBrothers,[1] where he and his brother, John Green, regularly upload videos. He is also the creator of the online environmental technology blog EcoGeek, and the founder of Subbable which was acquired in 2014 by Patreon.

Hank and his brother John created VidCon, the world's largest online video conference/convention.[2] He is involved with several other channels on YouTube, including Crash Course, SciShow, SciShow Space, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, The Brain Scoop, Animal Wonders, hankschannel, GamesWithHank, Cereal Time, How to Adult, Healthcare Triage, and Sexplanations.[3][4][5][6][7]

Personal life

Green was born in Birmingham, Alabama,[8] and his family soon moved to Orlando, Florida, where he was raised.[8] He graduated from Winter Park High School in 1998 and then earned a B.S. in Biochemistry from Eckerd College and a M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana.[9] He resides in Missoula, Montana with his wife, Katherine Green.[10]

VlogBrothers

Brotherhood 2.0 (2007)

Main article: VlogBrothers

From January 1 to December 31, 2007, Green and his brother John ran a video blog project titled Brotherhood 2.0.[11][12] The original project ran every week day for the entire year, with the premise that the brothers would cease all text-based ("textual") communication for the year and instead converse by daily video blogs, made available to the public via their YouTube channel Vlogbrothers and on their website. If, for some reason, the video was over 4 minutes or uploaded late, then punishments would be set out for the offender. The initial idea for the project was John's when, during an instant messaging conversation between the two, he pointed out they had not gone past the realms of communication via phone conversations, e-mails, and instant messaging for nearly a year.[13]

Recurring themes included "Nerdfighters", adding the phrase "in your pants" to the end of book titles, "Song Wednesdays", "Question Tuesdays" (these normally did not take place on a Tuesday, which led to video titles such as "Question Tuesday on Friday"), punishments for breaking the rules, placing items on heads, clips of Hank 'humping' various items, the DFTBA initialism ('Don't Forget To Be Awesome'), and featuring intercourse between giraffes as the thumbnail for videos.

By December 31, 2007, the brothers had decided to continue vlogging even though the project had ended.

Post-Brotherhood 2.0 (2008–present)

In 2008, John and Hank met up with their fans, known as "Nerdfighters". The first gathering was a last minute decision, but despite the short three-day notice, nearly a hundred people attended. In August, John and Hank were invited to the Google office in Chicago to talk about the project.[14] That same day, they filled the Harold Washington Library with about four hundred young adults.[15]

Following John's tour to promote his third novel, Paper Towns, the brothers went on a national tour in November. With events in 17 different cities, they met thousands of Nerdfighters at local libraries and community centers. During this tour, Hank released his first album of Nerdfighter-themed songs, titled So Jokes.[16]

The Green brothers have been interviewed on PotterCast and have been recurring keynote speakers at the Harry Potter fan convention LeakyCon.[17]

The Brotherhood 2.0 project succeeded in its original mission. The two brothers have come to communicate more thoroughly with each other, and have a larger influence in each other's lives than before the project was initiated. The brothers talked on the phone once or twice a year before Brotherhood 2.0, but, according to Hank's wife Katherine, they now "talk almost every day."[18]

John and Hank continued to post vlogs every Tuesday and Friday on their channel. Their video topics vary from explanations of current events, reunion videos, joke videos, rant videos, thoughts from various places, Question Tuesdays, random topics, and more. As of October 5, 2015, they have posted 1,272 videos.[19] With over 2,650,000 subscribers, they are the 149th most subscribed directors on the website. Their videos have been watched over 565,000,000 times.[19][20]

Other web projects

In January 2012, Hank and John began new projects, YouTube web-shows "Crash Course" and "SciShow". "Crash Course" is an educational series, with weekly episodes consisting of John teaching world history, U.S. history, and literature, and Hank teaching biology, chemistry, ecology, psychology, and physiology.[3] SciShow features Hank updating viewers on scientific knowledge and news.[4]

On April 9, 2012, Hank Green and co-creator, Bernie Su, premiered a new web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. This series is a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, his wife's favorite book, and is conveyed through the form of vlogs. The series stars Ashley Clements, Mary Kate Wiles, Laura Spencer, and Julia Cho. The channel has over 160,000 subscribers, with more than 22.5 million video views. The series also bridged other online media, such as Twitter and Tumblr pages under the names of characters and entities from the series.[21] Green was also one of the writers of the series.[22]

In his VlogBrothers video uploaded on December 7, 2012, Green featured Emily Graslie, a curatorial assistant at the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum. In this video, she showed Green a wide variety of specimens in the lab. Due to her ease in front of the camera, enthusiasm, and fan comments, Graslie was offered her own YouTube channel "The Brain Scoop" as a part of the Nerdfighter family. The series debuted in January 2013. Her work on the series has been described by journalists as "articulate and hilarious", as well as enthusiastic. The Brain Scoop was acquired by The Field Museum of Natural History in 2014 [23]

More recently, Green has been working as executive producer on a new YouTube channel called "Sexplanations" with Dr. Lindsey Doe, a sexologist, to try to educate people about and open up a safe space to ask questions about sex, relationships, sexuality, contraceptives, and anything else that needs to be discussed. Their first video debuted June 10, 2013, introducing Dr. Doe and opening the conversation to the world.[24]

Project for Awesome

Main article: Project for Awesome

In 2007, John and Hank introduced the annual charity project titled the Project for Awesome (P4A),[25] a project in which YouTube users take two days, traditionally December 17 and 18, to create videos promoting charities or nonprofit organizations of their choosing. The total amount of money raised every year has continued to incrementally increase (with the exception of 2011). In 2015 a record $1,546,384 was raised.[26]

VidCon

Main article: VidCon
Hank (right), with his brother, John, at VidCon 2012

VidCon is an annual conference based around online video. Along with his brother, John, Hank founded VidCon in response to the growing online video community. Hank states, “We wanted to get as much of the online video community together, in one place, in the real world for a weekend. It's a celebration of the community, with performances, concerts, and parties; but it's also a discussion of the explosion in community-based online video.”[27]

The event draws many popular YouTube users, as well as their fans, and provides room for the community to interact. The event also contains an industry conference for people and businesses working in the online video field. Since its inception, the annual attendance of the event has grown.

2015 State of the Union

Green interviewed United States president Barack Obama on January 22, 2015 in a 13-minute one-on-one interview along with YouTube personalities GloZell Green and Bethany Mota, in relation to the 2015 State of the Union Address.[28] Green raised questions involving legalizing marijuana, sanctions to North Korea and the use of drone strikes against terrorism. Green also praised Obamacare, citing his personal experience with a chronic illness, while requesting the president to sign a photo of Green holding a pharmacy receipt with significantly reduced medicine prices.[29][30]

Dear Hank & John

Main article: Dear Hank & John

In June 2015, Hank Green and his brother John Green started a weekly podcast titled Dear Hank & John.[31] Taking a mainly humorous tone, each podcast opens with John reading a poem that he selected for the week before the brothers read a series of questions submitted by listeners and offering their advice. The podcast closes with a news segment with two standard topics: Mars, presented by Hank, and AFC Wimbledon, presented by John.

Career

Writing

Throughout high school and college Hank Green created and designed websites for himself and local clients. His first project, the "Mars Exploration Page" in 1994, experienced minor success on the heels of the Mars Pathfinder Mission. Later website, IHateI4.com, brought press from local news channels and the Orlando Sentinel.[32] Green continued as a web developer after moving to Montana for graduate school, focusing on developing websites for educational institutions (including the University of Montana) and environmental non-profit organizations.

While in graduate school, Green created "EcoGeek", a blog focusing on technological advancements that would benefit the environment.[20] Starting out as a class project,[33] EcoGeek evolved into a major environmental publication.[34] EcoGeek caught the attention of Time, where it was described as "porn for hardcore science, tech and enviro freaks".[35] Writing about environmental issues, Green has been published on numerous environmental blogs, including Treehugger.com, Yahoo! Green, The National Geographic Green Guide, Scientific American, The Weather Channel, Planet Green, NPR[36] and in the New York Times.[37]

During the mid-2000s, Green wrote regularly for Mental Floss and co-authored one of their books, Mental Floss: Scatterbrained.[38]

Music

During the Brotherhood 2.0 project, Green accepted a challenge to perform bi-weekly an original song (known as "Song Wednesdays") and he has continued, though less frequently, to write, record, and perform songs since then. His songs include "I'm Gonna Kill You," "Baby, I Sold Your Dog on eBay," and "What Would Captain Picard Do?". Green's first successful song was "Accio Deathly Hallows", which was featured on YouTube's front page preceding the release of the final Harry Potter book,[39] and has been viewed over one and a half million times.[40]

Green's first studio album, So Jokes, was released in 2008 and reached number 22 on the Billboard Top 25 revenue generating albums online.[41] He has since released four other albums: I'm So Bad at This: Live! (2009), This Machine Pwns n00bs (2009), Ellen Hardcastle (2011) which was named for the winner of a 2010 charity raffle, and Incongruent (2014) with his new band, Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers.[42][43] The album was released on May 7, 2014.[44]

Business

In 2011, Green created "2-D" glasses, which allow one to watch 3-D movies in 2-D. The glasses were originally created for those who experience discomfort watching 3-D movies (such as Green's wife) and consist of either two right or two left lenses from a pair of regular 3-D glasses.[45] In January 2015, Green announced plans for a game company called DFTBA Games on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.[46] He launched the first DFTBA Games project Wizard School in September 2015. Wizard School is tabletop card game meant to emulate attending and "graduating" from "Wizard School." This project was fully funded within the same day it launched.[47]

DFTBA Records

Main article: DFTBA Records

DFTBA Records (an initialism for "Don't Forget to Be Awesome") is a record label that was co-founded by Green and Alan Lastufka in 2008. Its main focus is music generated by prominent YouTube stars, such as Green himself, Dave Days, Charlie McDonnell, Molly Lewis, and Rhett and Link, among others. DFTBA Records has a prominently independent distribution network.[48]

The goal of the record label, as Lastufka stated in a video on the subject, is to provide a distribution network for talented artists of YouTube and to make sure their music reaches out to the "largest audience possible."[49] The record label claims to aid a bigger audience in connecting with the artists, and make the "YouTube experience" more lucrative, more exciting, and more fun. Aside from music albums, the label's official website sells other forms of merchandise, such as T-shirts, accessories, and posters.

On June 19, 2014, Lastufka announced that he had sold his entire stake in the company and resigned as president, to pursue other projects.[50]

Discography

Hank Green discography

Hank Green
Studio albums 5
Live albums 1
EPs 1

Albums:

Live Albums:

Extended Plays:

Also appears on:

See also

References

  1. ↑ "VlogBrothers channel". YouTube. Retrieved January 11, 2012.
  2. ↑ AJ (July 3, 2014). "Indiegogo Celebrates YouTubers’ Big Successes at VidCon". Indiegogo. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  3. 1 2 "Crash Course". YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  4. 1 2 "SciShow". YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  5. ↑ "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries". YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  6. ↑ "The Brain Scoop". YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  7. ↑ Browning, Skylar. "Missoula's Hank Green wins an Emmy". Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  8. 1 2 Hank Green (May 16, 2007). "Brotherhood 2.0: May 16". VlogBrothers. YouTube. Retrieved May 15, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Hank's MySpace". Myspace. Retrieved January 11, 2012.
  10. ↑ "Fifth Anniversary with The Katherine". VlogBrothers. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
  11. ↑ "Brothers Reconnect Using Video Blogging". All Things Considered. NPR. January 20, 2008. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  12. ↑ "August 2007 Archive". Fox News. August 14, 2007. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  13. ↑ Shore, Jennifer (November 9, 2012). "How 2 Brothers Turned a YouTube Experiment Into a Charitable Mission". Mashable. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  14. ↑ Nerdfighters: Insider View from a YouTube Persona, Google Tech Talks, YouTube
  15. ↑ Vlogbrothers bring message to Chicago,video, CBS 2 News, August 8, 2008
  16. ↑ "So Jokes". Archived from the original on 2009-04-05. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  17. ↑ "Keynote Speaker Announcement". The Leaky Cauldron.
  18. ↑ Akimoff, Timothy Alex (August 10, 2008). "Big Sky nerds: Brothers still speak for underdog". The Missoulian. Retrieved November 1, 2014.
  19. 1 2 "Vlogbrothers on StatSheep". Statsheep.com. Retrieved April 18, 2014.
  20. 1 2 "Recession-resistant jobs". Missoula Independent. September 3, 2009. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  21. ↑ "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries | A modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice". Lizziebennet.com. Retrieved April 4, 2004.
  22. ↑ Colozza, Jenna (May 7, 2013). "A modern spin on an old classic". Times Union. Retrieved May 15, 2013.
  23. ↑ Patel, Sahil (Dec 4, 2014). "Vlogbrothers Brain Scoop Channel Acquired by Field Museum of Chicago". The Video Ink. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  24. ↑ Doe, Dr. Lindsey. Sexplanations #1 – Meet Lindsey!. Sexplanations (YouTube). Retrieved June 16, 2013.
  25. ↑ John Green; Hank Green (2011). "Home". Project4Awesome 2011. Project For Awesome. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
  26. ↑ "Project For Awesome 2015". www.projectforawesome.com. Retrieved 2016-04-22.
  27. ↑ John Green; Hank Green (December 31, 2009). VidCon Questions Answered. VidCon (YouTube). Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  28. ↑ "The YouTube Interview with President Obama". YouTube. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
  29. ↑ "YouTubers ask Obama about pot, race relations and what 'superpower' the President would like". NY Daily News. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
  30. ↑ "YouTube stars grilled President Obama, and it got totally weird". Mashable. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
  31. ↑ "Dear Hank & John". SoundCloud. Retrieved 2016-04-23.
  32. ↑ "Road Rants Go Online". Orlando Sentinel. August 22, 2003. Retrieved April 4, 2014.
  33. ↑ Weber, Jonathan (April 11, 2006). "EcoGeek Makes a Splash in Debut". NewWest. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  34. ↑ Catone, Josh (October 15, 2007). "The Top 35 Environmental Blogs". ReadWriteWeb. Archived from the original on 2009-02-25. Retrieved January 11, 2012.
  35. ↑ Roston, Eric (April 17, 2008). "Green Websites EgoGeek". Time. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  36. ↑ Headlee, Celeste (July 7, 2008). "Shell Opens Hydrogen Station In L.A.". NPR. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  37. ↑ Green, Hank (October 14, 2007). "Notes on a sick planet". The New York Times. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  38. ↑ Editors of mental floss (2006). Mental Floss: Scatterbrained. New York: Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-088250-1. Green read part of the novel he is working on a livestream video to raise funds for an indiegogo project by The Harry Potter Alliance
  39. ↑ Heilman, Elizabeth E. (2009). Critical perspectives on Harry Potter. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96484-5.
  40. ↑ Green, Hank (July 18, 2007). July 18: Accio Deathly Hallows (no spoilers). VlogBrothers (YouTube). Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  41. ↑ "TuneCore May TuneCore Charts (Covering February 2009 Sales)" (PDF). Shore Fire Media. May 5, 2009. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  42. ↑ Green, Hank (April 16, 2014). "Incongruent". Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  43. ↑ Cirilo, Joe (July 1, 2014). "Hank Green And The Perfect Strangers Incongruent". The Aquarian. Retrieved August 25, 2014.
  44. ↑ Green, Hank (April 25, 2014). I Love Science (Clean Version) (Uncensored link in the Description). VlogBrothers. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  45. ↑ Browning, Skylar (June 16, 2011). "Two D's better than three Hank Green finds a place in Hollywood's excess". Missoula Independent. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  46. ↑ "DFTBA Games". Kickstarter. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
  47. ↑ "Wizard School". Kickstarter. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
  48. ↑ Crum, Chris (September 29, 2009). "Record Label Launched for YouTube Stars". Web Pro News. Archived from the original on 2015-07-22.
  49. ↑ 187: Books, DFTBA Records and Holidays. YouTube. November 24, 2008. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  50. ↑ Lastufka, Alan (June 18, 2014). "This morning I sold my entire stake in DFTBA Records.". Tumblr. Retrieved July 21, 2014.

External links

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