About me

Hello, It's Cleo here!

I've been making videos for my YouTube channel MLP Fever since 2015., but that doesn't really describe how I got into this or why, so I'll explain:

I'm such an old dinosaur that I actually didn't grow up with the ponies I show in my videos.  I was a 90's baby, so I in fact grew up with 'generation 2' My Little Pony figures. These were discontinued in 2003, and when they were replaced with the very different 'generation 3' figures, I completely lost interest in the toys. 

Time passed, and I got to the oh-so-grown-up age of fifteen and decided I was too old to keep all my childhood toys (not all of them; I kept most!) . This is when I thought to check to see if my ponies had any value on the internet: they absolutely did. Some of my old toys were worth over £200 at the time, and to a teenager that seemed like an enormous amount of money.  Through looking for the value of these relatively rare ponies, I found that there was a whole community of adult collectors buying and selling ponies on dedicated forums.  I signed up to these forums just to sell my things , and I remember I had to wait for my sixteenth birthday to be allowed to sell on them. I waited, and I sold a good chunk of ponies to very happy collectors. You'd think I'd leave it at that, but for some reason, I stayed around on the forums.  For someone who didn't care about ponies, I seemed to like talking about them an awful lot!

Seeing as this was 2013, from this point onward,  it didn't take long for me to find out about the Friendship is Magic cartoon and the huge fanbase for it online. They happened to be showing episodes on a TV channel, so because of being told over and over how great this show was, my youngest brother and I decided to give a go. Of course we liked it, and then really loved it. It was cute and funny and unlike any 'girl' cartoon I had seen before. 

I decided I just wanted the main characters, so I bought them from sellers on the same forums I sold my childhood ponies on. It couldn't be more ironic.  Now of course I have all the characters...

Later on I found out through a news article that the most viewed channel on YouTube of 2014 was Disney Toys Collector (or something like that). All this was was a channel of a woman opening up blind bags and surprise eggs.  I was very curious about this and eventually went down an rabbit hole of related content until eventually I found mlpstopmotion's channel on there.  She was making her own stories with her pony toys - what an idea! I saw that although she had the words 'stop motion' in her name, she didn't do that. 'Hm, I could do real stop motion with my ponies' I thought, so I did.

My first attempts at this were rough to say the least. I had never made films of any kind before and despite my first assumption that it wasn't going to difficult, it definitely was.  Every aspect of making YouTube videos is harder than it looks, and I made more mistakes than I can even begin to list here. One lesson always led into another, and one failure or challenge led to ten more.  

My content has changed over the years, and grew many branches, but at present, I'm in the process of pruning these branches. I want to get back to why I started this channel in the first place: storytelling.

My greatest passion in life is making stories. Despite my earlier story of deciding I was too grown up for ponies at the age of fifteen, I actually played with other toys for far longer than most children. I even continued to play with my younger brother until I was about seventeen.  Making up stories and characters was more fun than anything, and my fondest memories of childhood are of playing creatively for hours.  I see my videos as an evolution of this creative play.  

Humble as it is, this one channel is a huge part of my life.  I've learned so much from putting myself and ideas out there for people to see. I've gained confidence, friends, opportunities,  gifts, knowledge, and skills I otherwise never would have.

The only thing better than having the fun I do making my films is seeing how much all of you enjoy them. There is no better feeling in the world than reading your kind comments, or seeing you in person and hearing your words of encouragement.  Thank you all for being there, be it only for one video, or for all the years I've been online. You mean more than you know.