NO. 23 — EXPRESS YOURSELF
home video tapes of us background dancing to NSYNC in our grandmother’s living room. I’ve always loved creating, whether it was art, dance, videos on my huge camcorder back in the 90’s, as long as I was making something, I was happy. I’m not sure if there was a distinctive moment, I think being of Filipino descent, I just instinctively love performing. What style of dance do you prefer? The type of dance I do is called Urban Choreography and I will always choose that; to watch, to create, to perform, it has the biggest potential to amalgamate so many different dance styles into something that ends up being completely its own. I think it’s incredibly smart and enigmatic with the possibilities of how to make a song visual being endless. You started off by posting choreography videos on your YouTube channel. How and when did you decide to branch out to more personality/ lifestyle videos? I became interested in expanding my personality when I moved to Los Angeles and fell into a group of friends who all created comedy videos on YouTube. After being in a few of their videos, I loved the idea of using your words, something that we don’t do while dancing, in order to create a story or make people feel a certain way. I was really scared to put out my first ‘non-dance’ video because anyone that had subscribed was there for the dancing. That’s why whenever I posted a dance video, I added a sketch comedy element so that I could almost ease people into personality-only videos. You’ve had your channel for six years now. How would you say your channel has evolved? Wow, in almost every way that it could, I feel like it’s grown. It started as a place where I put videos
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of dance classes I would substitute, then graduated to doing more conceptual dance videos, into comedic cooking series, sketch comedy, and now this lifestyle-dance-how to-comedy center for people to get a little bit of everything that I’m interested in. From a consistency standpoint, I went from uploading whenever I taught, to every now and then, to once a week and now I’m at twice a week. Here’s to more growth! Where do you find inspiration for your videos? Depending on the type of video, most of the inspiration just somewhat appears. If it’s a dance video, chances are I heard the song on a random Spotify playlist and dreamt up a premise and ran with it. For the cooking series, I usually try to take something ordinary and familiar and make it non-ordinary and foreign but still enticing to eat. So far everything has turned out not only edible, but pretty darn good too. Your website, meganbatoon.com, is a creative space for you to express and share your style with your fans. What was your main goal when creating and launching this style blog? The reason for the blog is two-fold. I get asked fairly frequently where my outfits are from and instead of replying separately with all of the items, I figured that there was a better and more creative way to give people answers. I knew the fashion world was already structured and I’d be coming from left field so I put my own spin on it with my touch of humor in every blurb. The other half of the reason is because one day I’d love to have my own collection of travel goods, decor, fashion pieces, candles, you name it in a store like Target and I thought a consistent style blog would assist in opening up a door down that path.