Over the past six years, Canberra YouTubers Chelsea and Natalia Brunton have produced “a time capsule” of their lives through vlogging.
Speaking to Canberra Daily just weeks before Natalia was due to give birth, since establishing their channel they’ve covered events like Australia’s 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, as well as more personal experiences like their engagement, wedding and pregnancy.
“It was cool that we were documenting our lives and our relationships at such pivotal times with such big social change,” Natalia said.
Additionally, they produce videos offering general advice for people wanting to come out and other information on LGBTIQ+ couples.
“We have a lot of people messaging us saying ‘hey, because of you I was able to come out to my parents or my best friend’,” Chelsea said.
“And it’s things like that, it’s crazy because we just think we’re us and we’re uploading videos.”
Their combined YouTube channel has over 24,200 subscribers and more than 2,797,600 views since it was created in August 2017.
The couple are grateful for the community they’ve built.
“You never know how this thing is going to go … but it’s been really awesome to see that people want to surround themselves with either likeminded people or the ability to educate themselves further,” Natalia said.
Independently active creators on YouTube prior to meeting, Chelsea said the combined channel started “organically” to spread awareness about LGBTIQ+ relationships.
Having steadily grown their audience over the past four years, the couple have fostered a following who feel like “family”.
Natalia, who moderates the comments on their channel, said she barely sees anything homophobic.
“That goes to show how things are starting to change and there’s more acceptance,” she said. “And I think that all comes down to education, exposure and awareness.”
Prolific creators have ‘over 400 videos’ behind them
Without being able to pin down an exact number, Chelsea and Natalia estimate they’ve created over 400 videos between them.
“A lot of them have been privated because they are pretty cringe,” Natalia smiled.
Natalia began producing content for YouTube about a decade ago when she was in college.
After discovering it, her academic pursuits took a back seat.
It quickly became her creative outlet and occupied a lot of her time both inside and outside of school hours.
“I didn’t even know I was gay at the time, I was just creating ‘comedy’ content,” she smiled, “I say comedy really loosely because I am not a comedian.
“We’re going to keep those in the vault, no one gets to see those!”
Chelsea’s original channel was very fashion-driven, featuring looks, makeup tutorials and other related content.
After some time producing videos together just to divvy them up between their separate channels, eventually they decided to create a unified channel.
“We realised we were creating all this content together but independently, and we thought ‘why don’t we bring this together and make it a hub’,” Natalia said.
Dramatically different to what they produce together today, the couple have found their groove in vlogging.
“It’s kind of like a little time capsule into our world,” Natalia said.
“I definitely outgrew my channel in terms of the things I wanted to create, and the stuff we’re doing now feels way more organic and natural,” she said.
The couple aim to upload a video a week.
With editing duties usually falling on Natalia, their weekly schedule sometimes slides, very understandably, given the pregnancy.
Having lived in Sydney and the Gold Coast, the couple returned to Natalia’s hometown of Canberra over a year ago.
Chelsea said the ACT has been a “super-accepting place” for the couple.
“Canberra has definitely been a loving place for us,” she said.
Now producing all their content here, Natalia said it’s been “cool bringing it back home” after years away.
“We’ve documented in a million cities around the world but being able to bring it back home is really special because we can have family and friends involved,” she said.
“It’s such an exciting journey that we’re on right here, and the fact that my baby is going to be born in the exact same hospital I was born in is just such a cool, full circle experience.”
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