Hank Green

Not to be confused with William Henry Green.

Hank Green
Born	William Henry Green II (1980-05-05) May 5, 1980 Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Residence	Missoula, Montana
Known for	Blogging, vlogging, green technology, singing, SciShow
Notable work(s)	Vidcon, Vlogbrothers, Project for Awesome, 2D Glasses, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Spouse(s)	Katherine "The Katherine" Green (m. 2006)
Relatives	John Green (brother), Henry Green (nephew), Alice Green (niece)
Website
hankgreen.comwww.ecogeek.org

William Henry "Hank" Green II (born 5 May 1980) is an American entrepreneur, musician, and vlogger. He is best known for his YouTube channel Vlogbrothers where he regularly uploads videos along with his brother, John Green. He is also the creator of the online environmental technology blog EcoGeek. He is involved with several other channels on YouTube, including Crash Course, SciShow, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, The Brain Scoop, and "Sexplanations".

Personal life

Green was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and his family soon moved to Orlando, Florida, where he was raised. He graduated from Winter Park High School in 1998 and then earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Eckerd College and a master's degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana. Green currently resides in Missoula, Montana, with his wife Katherine, their cat Cameo, and their dog Lemon.

Brotherhood 2.0

Main article: Vlogbrothers

From January 1 to December 31, 2007, Green and his brother John ran a video blog project entitled Brotherhood 2.0. The original project ran daily 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 is over 4 minutes or 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.

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, 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.

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. That same day, they filled the Harold Washington Library with some four hundred young adults. 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, entitled So Jokes.

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

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."

John and Hank continued to post vlogs every Tuesday and Friday on their channel. As of September 14, 2012, they have posted 1,000 videos. With over a million subscribers, they are the 149th most subscribed directors on the website. Their videos have been watched over 300 million times.

In 2012, John and Hank also began new projects, YouTube web-shows named "Crash Course" and "SciShow" (both of which began late January). "CrashCourse" is an educational series, with weekly episodes consisting of John teaching World History, U.S. History, and Literature, and Hank teaching Biology, Chemistry, and Ecology. SciShow features Hank updating viewers on scientific knowledge and news.

Other Projects

On April 9, 2012, 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, Green's favorite book, and is conveyed through the form of vlogs. It stars Ashley Clements, Mary Kate Wiles, Laura Spencer, and Julia Cho. The channel has over 160,000 subscribers, and 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. Green was also one of the writers of the series.

In his VlogBrothers video that was uploaded on December 7, 2012, Green featured a curatorial assistant at the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum, Emily Graslie. 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.

More recently, Green has been working as executive producer on a new YouTube channel called "Sexplanations" with Dr. Lindsey Doe, a qualified 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.

Project for Awesome

Main article: Project for Awesome

In 2007, John and Hank introduced the charity project entitled the Project for Awesome (P4A), 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. In 2012, they raised a total of $483,446, surpassing their goal of $100,000.

Career

Web development

Throughout high school and college Green created and designed for himself and local clients. His first project, his 1996 "Mars Exploration Page", experienced minor success on the heels of the Mars Pathfinder Mission. Later, another semi-viral hit, IHateI4.com, brought local news channels and the Orlando Sentinel knocking on his door.

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.

Writing and journalism

While in graduate school, Green created EcoGeek, a blog focusing on technological advancements that would benefit the environment. Starting out as a class project, EcoGeek evolved into a major environmental publication.

EcoGeek caught the attention of Time, where it was described as "porn for hardcore science, tech and enviro freaks". Writing about environmental issues, Green has been published on numerous environmental blogs, including Treehugger.com, Yahoo! Green, The National Geographic Green Guide, and Scientific American.

Green's work has appeared on The Weather Channel, Planet Green, NPR and in the New York Times. During the mid-2000s, Green wrote regularly for Mental Floss and co-authored one of their books, Mental Floss: Scatterbrained.

Music

During the Brotherhood 2.0 project, Green accepted a challenge to perform an original song biweekly (known as "Song Wednesdays") and he has continued, though less frequently, to write, record, and perform songs ever since. Green's music is lyrically driven with a focus on wit. 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, and has been viewed over one and a half million times. The front-page feature gave the Vlogbrothers' YouTube channel its first significant boost in traffic.

Green's first studio album, So Jokes, was released whilst he was on tour with his brother John, promoting the book Paper Towns. The album reached number 22 on the Billboard top 25 revenue generating albums online. He has since released three other albums- I'm So Bad at This: Live! (2009), This Machine Pwns n00bs (2009) and most recently Ellen Hardcastle (2011), named for the winner of a charity raffle in 2010.

Business

Green's latest business move has been the creation and marketing of "2-D" glasses, which allow one to watch 3-D movies in 2-D, originally created for those who experience discomfort watching 3-D, such as Green's wife. The glasses consist of either two right or two left lenses from a pair of regular 3-D glasses.

DFTBA Records

Not to be confused with DFA 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, Alex Day, Chameleon Circuit, Molly Lewis, Rhett and Link, VenetianPrincess, NicePeter, Jason Munday and several others. Distribution of records by DFTBA Records is largely independent; Lastufka himself generally oversees most of the distribution.

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." 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. The offices of DFTBA Records were in Manhattan, Illinois, until early 2013 when they were moved to Hank's hometown of Missoula, Montana.

VidCon

Main article: VidCon

VidCon is an annual conference based around online video. The conference was created by Hank Green and his brother John 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.” 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. The first Vidcon was hosted in July 2010. The second Vidcon took place on July 28–30, 2011. The third annual Vidcon also took place on June 28–30, 2012.

Discography

• So Jokes (2008)
• I'm So Bad at This: Live! (2009)
• This Machine Pwns n00bs (2009)
• Ellen Hardcastle (2011)
• Tour de Nerdfighting (2012)

Also appears on:

• Wrock for Darfur (2008)
• DFTBA Records, Volume One (2009)
• C4N'7 R3M1X35 (2010)
• DFTBA Records, Volume Two (2010)
• DFTBA Records, Volume Three (2012)

See also

• List of YouTube celebrities

External links

• Official website