 As you can all see, I'm known here on YouTube as Jelly Jess, but that hasn't always been the case. It's finally time I come clean about my secret past on the platform. Hi! Okay, I can 100% confirm that this is a story that no other animation channel has ever had to do before. Hey guys, my name is Jess and to be honest, I have some explaining to do. Let's start simple. The 28th of February is actually my 11th year anniversary on YouTube! Oh! Worth all! Yeah! Wait, the vast majority of you guys would have no idea what I'm talking about and that's okay, we will get to that in a sec. Thumbs up because I really do be out here about to expose myself. Okay, okay, okay. Grab a snack, sit back, get comfortable, this is a long one. Let's start from the beginning. February 2011. I am 10 years old. I was chilling with my brother in his room one night, drawing and listening to whatever music he decided to put on. At the time, he had got a new laptop and would let me search things to watch on this very site, YouTube. I still remember the first thing I typed in, that being Romeo take me somewhere No, no, no! Anything but that. Oh, okay, uh, this was the moment that changed my life. In front of my eyes were hundreds of these toy videos and I was mesmerized, feeling so inspired by it all. I had suddenly stumbled across an entire community of other kids from all around the world who I shared a common interest with. For as long as I can remember, I have always been the biggest animal lover. I'm sure you guys can see that in just my content alone. When I was younger, my toys consisted of like 99% animals and like 1% brats dolls. So when I saw these animal toys for the first time, I became obsessed. These toys gladly took my money. They were Hasbro's littlest pet shop also known as LPS for short. If you don't know what these are, I don't know what to say other than, you were missing out because these, these were the THING back then. They were just plastic animals with big eyes and wobbly heads, but there were so many different types of animals, let alone thousands of variations to collect. I am not kidding, just look! I was quickly known as that LPS obsessed girl throughout primary school and had collected over 400 of these toys. My obsession came to fruition when I received my first ever littlest pet shop at my 6th birthday party many years before creating my own channel. I began collecting the houses, the pets, the accessories at this time, so by the time I started making YouTube videos, I was set. This was my humble beginning into a community I would learn is called LPS Tube. Hey guys! Hello pretty peeps! There's so many other LPS tubers, approximately the same age as me, making great LPS videos that everyone can enjoy. There's so many unique videos out there, the different people with some great ideas. Your ideas can go wild. I started filming with my iPod Touch 4th Gen's camera, aka Potato, posting to a channel I named LPS Pet World. I was so full of joy when creating these silly videos at 10 years old, I guess you could say I found my passion at the time. It allowed me to be creative, come up with stories and characters and share them with the world. I was hooked. Lizzie, you might want to have a look at this. Okay. The LPS community on YouTube was very welcoming and I was constantly working on videos whenever I had free time. I can't help myself! The displays of creativity within the fandom are amazing and unlike other larger fandoms, it's an incredibly wholesome and kind community with barely any drama or tension. Back to present tense for a moment. That clip you just saw was from a creator called Izzyzz, where she does deep dive videos into tons of fandoms and topics. She just so happened to create one about LPS and the community as a whole and I highly recommend watching it if you want to find out more information about everything LPS related. It is worth the watch. I will be playing small snippets occasionally from her video to help illustrate what I'm talking about and the link to her channel will be in the description. Back to 2011. Through these little animal toys, I documented my experiences visiting my grandparents' house on the Gold Coast for holidays, developed my own past childhood toy stories into video narratives, made some based on real life experiences, basically anything that came to mind, I did it with LPS. I just really loved telling stories. This new hobby brought me so much happiness, but unfortunately, I was extremely self-conscious as soon as I began my journey. Right from the beginning, I was even contemplating changing the pitch of my voice because I was just so worried that people from my school was going to find out and mock me for it. I decided against it though because really, what are the chances someone from my town would find my content and recognize my voice in it? The chances seemed very slim, nearly impossible, but that thought would still play constantly in the back of my mind. When I spoke, I started to put on a bit of an accent to further hide my identity. I added a slight American-sounding element to my speech which I actually got used to quite quickly and found a comfort in recording this way. It became sort of like my YouTube persona, a character I would switch into which felt separate from myself. It's great that these plastic toys have allowed so many kids to express themselves even if in the future they may look back and think it was a little cringe. Present just again! Here's a fun fact for you all! Heaps of my early JellyJest videos actually have many traces of this accent because that's just how I learned to present. I looked over to the other groups and they managed it just fine. It was smooth, running off the spoon. I've made a conscious effort to work on this though and I do believe I am more myself now than ever and for the most part my Aussie accent shines through. Sometimes I still have to tone it down though because look, some words with an Australian accent just sound so... off? Oh no! Cleo! Other than my mum and two brothers, I didn't tell a single soul about my YouTube channel. It took me a whole year to build up the courage just to tell my closest friend. So the LPS Pet World channel got wrecked by copyright strikes in 2012. I was just an ignorant little kid making videos and I was using music that I personally liked at the time. Stuff like Selena Gomez in the scene, Demi Lovato and all that kind of Disney junk. I think you get the idea. So, as a result, I started a new channel which I stuck to. The name was very similar, My LPS Pet World. I probably won't upload for about a month until like more people get to find my channel and stuff. But after that I'm going to be uploading once a week or once every two weeks. I was posting weekly and if I couldn't it was fortnightly. Grind time was all the time! I eventually got a partnership with YouTube during mid-2013. I was only making a few dollars here and there in the beginning but it felt pretty cool to receive something in return from YouTube themselves after everything I had put in. With this money I upgraded to an iPod 5th gen. Loooooooool! And continued to do the same silly, sorry I mean cringe-worthy content looking back on it now. Anyway, I'm depuing. And you guessed it, I still had this secret hidden away from everyone. From the 2010s onward, LPS2 became more popular than ever and the production quality increased accordingly. While the old videos were usually recorded in a dark bedroom with like a Nokia, new videos were coming out in high definition with nice lighting and sound quality not to mention some really impressive set building. By this time, my audience had grown significantly more than I ever thought it would. That's when I thought it was time to do a bigger and much better upgrade of my equipment. I bought a Nikon DSLR camera and some softbox lights because recording videos with toys in front of a window for direct sunlight began to make me feel more and more uncomfortable the older I got. Getting the lights changed everything for me production-wise. It meant I could switch to filming my content at night to avoid screaming kids and lawnmowers outside. No joke, it felt like all the neighbors were taking shifts in who was cutting grass when. Honestly, not much has changed to this day. It was at this time that I actually also invested in new doll furniture to create visually nicer scenes for the videos. I began to script a lot more of my content, especially when working on skits despite becoming more known for my parody videos, which were pretty much all improvised on the spot. Hence their stupidity. I also opened a merch store from home, selling things like posters and stickers, which was really fun to do. Since my channel had grown over the years, I was very fortunate to call YouTube my stable job, and therefore didn't want to search for work elsewhere when I got to this age like most of my peers. Which side note was quite pointless, we were basically forced to pick a career path in only a few minutes to tell the class, BRUH. I had no idea what I wanted to do then, six years later and I'm only just kind of figuring it out now, huh? Anyway, I got pulled aside by my teacher after one of our classes finished. She was quite old, a boomer if you will, very unhelpful and really stuck in her traditional ways when it came to careers and just wasn't too nice. One day she was like, Jess you should get a job, I think it would be good for you. I don't want a job. Why not, you can't sit around on your butt for the rest of your life you know. Yes, I know I could have told this teacher about my YouTube, but would you honestly expect me to be like, oh yeah, I play with toys in front of a camera and get paid for it. Nope. To be honest, I don't even think she would have understood the concept or she would have spread the word like wildfire. That fear was still on my mind. Plus she wasn't nice so she doesn't deserve to know. In high school, if any childhood toys were brought up in conversation, all of my friends would remember me as the LPS girl. This gave me such a sharp sense of panic, but luckily nobody knew about my channel or anything, so it was just all memories from childhood. Thank God! These conversations and my responses would play over and over again in my head. Did I say something wrong? Did I come off as sus? Did they find out about my channel and aren't telling me? The anxiousness surrounding this had been building up for years. I began devoting more hours into creating videos with many late-night recording sessions and last-minute assignments being worked on for school. Sorry again, Mum! I spent time working on videos rather than hanging out with friends at points. And unfortunately, the more videos I produced, the passion I once had started to feel like a chore. As I got older, I became frustrated and tired of making LPS videos. My heart just wasn't in it anymore. At this point, though, my channel was performing the best it ever had before, and I was receiving so many lovely comments from viewers. Jess, you are my favourite YouTuber. Please never quit or I will be very sad. Please don't quit. You brighten my day. Thank you. I can't wait for your future videos. I didn't want to let anyone down. I was so worried about upsetting people, so I never actually came out and said I didn't enjoy making LPS videos anymore. Putting myself into their shoes, I too would be upset if my favourite YouTuber stopped making videos. I also didn't want to take YouTube for granted and throw away everything I had worked for either. I was so grateful to even have this opportunity and to have such positive and supportive viewers. So, I pushed my feelings aside and continued putting out content. By this point, I considered most of my videos very unfunny or sometimes boring, but people still seemed to be enjoying it, so that was good enough for me. I became burnt out and was just not having a fun time like I used to. The love for LPS and the passion for making these videos had faded away.