Charlotte Lines: "You just have to put your magic, your style on it."
- Castor Chan
- Mar 2, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 31, 2021
Charlotte and Hannah are the two content creators behind YouTube channel The Purple Sector, and for this week’s article I was able to speak to Charlotte. (catch Hannah’s part coming next week!) The two started TPS at the end of April last year and recently hit 1000 subscribers, and I sat down with Charlotte to chat about her views on being a female creator and some of the things that goes with success and publicity.
Castor: You and Hannah met on Twitter to form TPS, but how did you meet the FSeries girls and how was your relationship like when you all built the channel?
Charlotte: How me and Hannah met is basically how all the FSeries met as well, it was in a group chat. I think it was beginning of May, mid-May, there was a massive group chat made of all the content creators on YouTube. When we went in I think the only girls in there were me, Hannah, Keira, Beth and Dornie, just the 5 of us. So we made a separate group chat to talk about girly stuff. Then more and more female content creators joined and got added to the group as well.
One day when Alonso was announced that he was coming back we literally just said ‘should we just film a video?’ In our group chat we were going off like ‘we didn’t want him back, should we just film a video, see how it goes?’ The first video is on Keira’s channel, bless her, and you can just see a recorded zoom call with a border around it and it's just us talking. And people were proper getting behind it and really really liked it, so it was like okay, we’re gonna start filming more. And that was when FSeries as a brand really came in properly. It was also October time when we added Steph, she was our friend from the beginning so I don’t know why she wasn’t in it. So literally a group chat during lockdown, we all got close, filmed one video and it’s gone from there. And I think it's gone pretty well to be fair.
Ca: You said there were a 100 people in the group chat, so with all the content creators and even the new ones coming out during the pandemic, how do you keep you ideas unique?
Ch: Obviously you will do a video that is the same as someone else, you just have to sort of put your sort of like magic, your sort of style on it. We’ve got a lot of videos coming out on FSeries that one or two of us will also do but just in a different way. I know Aidan, he’ll ask ideas in the group chat like ‘what do you think I can do in 24 hours.’ And no one else in that group chat will make a video like that because that’s not the sort of stuff that we do, but he will go and make it.
I think everyone has their own individual style. I think me and Hannah will stop doing the race reviews now because they are a lot to do as you have to film it and edit it very quickly, but we’ll just have to think of other series. On Steph’s channel she’s got ‘Stick or Twist’, that’s her own sort of series. You can come up with your own series and make loads of videos in that. So yeah you need to sort of look out and look at what people are wanting the most, a lot of people find that their race reviews don’t do as well because everyone’s watched the race. It is hard, but even if you do the same video as your friend, if you change it up and put your style on it it's still your video, it's still an idea so it’s alright.
Ca: Do you ever feel pressured as a content creator to continuously churn out videos and how do you deal with it?
Ch: So at the start, me and Hannah both felt it. Obviously the content creator group chat was quite small because people were just starting out. You had to keep putting out videos or else you wouldn’t get the subs, you wouldn’t get the views, you wouldn’t get the likes, you wouldn’t get the follows on Twitter. I’m always on Twitter so if I want to Tweet something it’s literally instant. But with Youtube you have to sit down, think what you want to do, make it, film it, edit it. So over Christmas me and Hannah had a break and we didn’t film anything. I was like, I’m not filming that’s fine, I didn’t feel the pressure because I knew I had a good following behind me. If they wanted to leave they could leave but they knew I’d be coming back.
And that’s so similar to FSeries. We wanted it to be like we were proper behind it, we’re still proper behind it now, but we were right behind it, we wanted to film this, this this, like we wanted to get the following. We’re still like that now, we’re still like ‘okay what are we going to film for the next two months, what days’ and everything like that. We want to keep building it up because we’ve got a good thing of FSeries in that we’re different to other people. We get a lot of messages saying like “I haven’t seen this many girls talking about F1 before,” and that’s what we want. So I would say for FSeries I would feel the pressure, but for TPS I don’t feel that much pressure. And to cope with this I just have to plan everything, because I’m literally a freak and I need a plan in front of me or I just can’t do it.
...there are more and more [girls] coming into the sport which is only going to be a more positive thing in the future.
Ca: You said you were on Twitter a lot, is there anything that you have had to change since you’ve developed a public presence?
Ch: Definitely, especially because I want to go into this sort of job. Motorsports teams or any sort of sports teams will do a background check on you, and I think it is really important. There are some times where I see something and I just have to bite my tongue because I’m quite opinionated, but I don’t want to have an argument online. In the back of my mind I’m like ‘I’m not the only one that’s on this account.’ If I’m on TPS that’s Hannah, she’s in a very serious course at uni and I don’t wanna get her in trouble; in FSeries there’s 5 other people and I don’t want to get them in trouble. So there are times where I’ve had to sit back, keep my emotions inside of me or I’ll go in the group chat and say what I would’ve Tweeted and then we can talk about it in the group chat. Just so I’m not putting it out online because I don’t want to be seen as a horrible person. That thing I want to say is just in the moment if I come back to the Tweet an hour later, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to say that.
The thing on Twitter, I feel like you have to be interactive, or you won’t get conversations with people, so yeah definitely on Twitter I sort of hide what I’m feeling a bit. You just have to do that, when you’re researching or talking to other people. It’s alright, I just have to bite my tongue and be quiet.
Ca: Being part of a group of girls talking motorsport, do you feel like you have to keep bringing in a female focus to motorsport and emphasise that you are a longtime fan to viewers who only assume that you are supportive of the younger drivers?
Ch: When I first started I thought okay, I probably will get comments like that. Because I like football, I like cricket, I get comments like that all the time, like ‘why do you like cricket, you’re a girl, you don’t know about football.’ With FSeries I think we’re just really just trying to break the stereotypes. Yes, I might say ‘George looks really nice in that top’, but I’m not just here to say he looks nice in the top, I’m also here to watch the racing. I don’t sit there all weekend watching them go round, wearing a helmet so I can’t even see their face, to be like ‘I watch it because the drivers are hot’.
We do get that sort of comments all the time, like ‘I’m not gonna listen to you because you’re a girl’. Some comments on YouTube are just really horrible so you just delete them, because I’m not going to put up with that. I think being a girl in F1 is still difficult, but I do think that there are more and more coming into the sport which is only going to be a more positive thing in the future. You’re still always gonna get that sort of comments about ‘you’re a girl why do you like F1’ or ‘name every champion’, but with the more girls that get involved and the more girls putting themselves online, like FSeries and TPS, it will get better.
Ca: You’ve recently hit 1000 subscribers in less than a year, how did you grow that sort of community around you and make your way into a male dominated sport with all the pressure?
Ch: At the start I thought it was just gonna be a bit of lockdown fun, I didn’t expect to still be doing it now to be honest. I thought I’ll go back to uni and that will be over. Then we started getting milestones on Twitter like we were hitting 600, 700 then 1000 followers. And I was like this is pretty serious, I know it’s only 1000 followers but it's still 1000 people. Then our YouTube, it was just going up too. At the start it was a bit slowly, like the first month we posted like 2 videos so it wasn’t gonna be loads. Then it just started growing and growing, and we were just like okay this is getting pretty big now, and obviously the group chat is amazing because everyone will support and promote everyone’s stuff. And with the people in the group chats, we are always promoting the premieres, tweeting about them, that is a really good way to get more following. It’s really easy because you’re not doing it, other people are doing it for you, but obviously you are doing it for other people in return.
And the fact that we are girls, and we do talk about F1, it does have its positives. I didn’t see anyone that liked F1 when I was watching it before I was in the female group chat. So it probably does help that other girls will follow you because they think ‘oh she’s like me.’ And then also boys will either be really positive or be really negative. I think you just have to keep going at it and I always Tweet every video on Twitter because thats where most of our traffic comes from. So you have to keep promoting there and that’s really it. Just be active on social media because if one person sees your Twitter and you Tweet ‘subscribe to my channel’ they will likely click on that link and subscribe. You also need a good community around you to help you. We were quite lucky and happy that we hit the 1k before the 29th of April which is our one year anniversary. We’re trying to get FSeries to 1k and we’re nearly there, we’re close.
Just keep going and not giving up... thats the most important thing.
Ca: What are some of your future goals to hit for both the channels and yourself?
Ch: For FSeries it's definitely the 1k, hopefully quite soon. For TPS, I do want to be close to 2k by the end of the year, I think once I have more time I can obviously do more stuff. Yeah I just want to keep going and keep interacting with people because it's really nice that I do really go on my own Twitter anymore, I just go on Purple Sector because I’m just talking to all them people. Like my little small group chat we talk every day literally about anything and thats really nice to have. So I want to get more people watching us obviously I want more views on YouTube, but yeah just keep going and not giving up I guess, thats the most important thing.
For myself, I just wanna be able to use what I do on TPS and FSeries to enhance my looking for a job because if a motorsport company see that I run a social media page and a YouTube, they can see that I’ve got the skills to do that in their company. Hopefully just keep hitting big milestones.
Ca: Favourite team and driver?
Ch: Got my McLaren delivery today finally, so my favourite team is McLaren but I like Mercedes as well. I started watching F1 because of Lewis and Jenson so gotta love Lewis. My favourite driver, I love Lando but it just changes all the time. I can change from Lando to Pierre to George I’m all over the place, but my all time favourite is Lewis just because I’ve watched him since I was little and he’s British so gotta get behind him. So yeah Lando, Lewis and George.
Was thrilled to have Charlotte on for the content creator series, she has wonderful content in the links below so be sure to check those out. This is a two-part interview with The Purple Sector girls so next week's will be Hannah's! I would also appreciate it if you subscribed via the form to keep up to date on my new articles and share if you enjoyed it!
Socials:
The Purple Sector Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8AAT1MGNY24RFSWBXl5MUQ
FSeries Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpjVZJ76JwfSECd_5L28cOA
Above photo provided by Charlotte
Comments