Corey Vidal

Corey Vidal (born December 7, 1986) is a Canadian YouTube content creator and entrepreneur. His YouTube videos have been seen over 100 million times and he has over 200,000 subscribers. In December 2007, Corey was one of the first Canadians to join the YouTube Partnership Program. In February 2013 he was named Niagara's Entrepreneur of the Year in Innovative Small Business for his video production company ApprenticeA Productions. He is the founder of Buffer Festival.

YouTube career Corey Vidal began on YouTube in mid-2006 by posting hip hop dance videos inspired by American dance reality television show So You Think You Can Dance. His popularity stemmed from the success of one of his first videos, How To Dance: "1, 2 Step" by Ciara (uploaded to YouTube on September 3, 2006), where he teaches dance steps to R&B singer Ciara's music video 1, 2 Step. The video currently has over 6.5 million views.

Following his How To Dance series, Corey branched into other types of videos. His channel career spans dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, beatboxing, acting in skits and short films (including a short film production by Niagara College), solving Rubik's Cubes, video blogging, and collaborating with other YouTubers. Many of his videos contain references to the Star Wars franchise. Microsoft Canada has contributed to one of Corey's videos, In May 2009, Vidal released a 33-part interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style video as part of a collaboration with Blendtec,

Corey first gained national Canadian media attention in the summer of 2008 when he was announced as the host of the 888 YouTube Gathering that took place August 8, 2008 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Corey hosted a one-hour show featuring many of YouTube's most popular "cewebrities", including KevJumba, HappySlip, Dave Days, Charles Trippy, Shay Carl, Philip DeFranco, and more.

Corey Vidal launched a second, daily-vlogging YouTube channel on January 1, 2011, called "ApprenticeEh", where he and the staff members of his company recorded and shared their lives every day. On January 1, 2017, the ApprenticeEh channel ended after 2,192 consecutive days of vlogging. ApprenticeEh operates out of Burlington, Ontario.

Corey appeared in the 2012 edition of the annual Ripley's Believe It or Not! book series for his work on YouTube.

In 2013, ApprenticeA Productions launched Buffer Festival, a film festival catered toward YouTubers.

ApprenticeA Productions partnered with Shay Carl to produce Vlogumentary, a feature-length documentary film about online video fame. It was picked up by Executive Producer Morgan Spurlock and released in 2016 exclusively on YouTube Red.

Star Wars (John Williams Is The Man) A Cappella Tribute

A notable success is his most popular video, a Star Wars a cappella tribute to composer John Williams - a video of Vidal lip-syncing to a song written in 1999 and recorded in 2002 by a cappella comedy troupe Moosebutter. The video was featured on YouTube Canada's homepage on November 3, 2008, and then again on the Worldwide homepage three days later. It appeared on the homepage of MSN.com, and was featured by MSN Videos and StupidVideos.com. As of November 2020, the video has been viewed over 22 million times since its upload on October 27, 2008. The video quickly became Canada's #1 Top Rated (All Time) and #1 Top Favorited (All Time) Entertainment video, and received many other All Time Honors both in Canada and Worldwide. It was also ranked as one of YouTube's Top 100 Rated videos of All Time, although YouTube retired the Honors system in November 2011. The Maclean's Book of Lists named it in their list of '10 Canadian viral sensations' in 2012.

On December 7, 2008, the video was nominated for a 35th Annual People's Choice Awards on CBS as "Favorite User Generated Video" of 2008. It faced competition in its category from other viral videos such as Barack Roll, Fred Goes Swimming, Where the Hell is Matt? (2008), and Wassup 2008. Vidal attended the red carpet event in Los Angeles on January 7, 2009. Warner pulled down every video on YouTube that contained any of their material. This included a complete purging of Madonna's YouTube account and all her videos, including the official music video to 4 Minutes as well as Madonna's message to YouTube. However, because Corey's claim had legally won in 2008, they were unable to remove his video. It currently has over 4 million views. Madonna's response video has since been restored.

John Williams/Star Wars A Cappella Tribute In mid-January 2009, Corey's Star Wars A Cappella video was removed from YouTube due to a DMCA copyright infringement claim by Warner Music Group. His entire account and all of his videos were suspended, then returned three days later, however the a cappella video remained banned and unviewable. For over a month, the official video was unavailable on YouTube, but copies were spread around the Internet by other uploaders on YouTube and other media sites. On February 24, 2009, the original video returned after Corey Vidal fought Warner's claim, citing the video as being protected under fair use. The video was restored with its original views, ratings, and comments.

Awards and nominations Year Nominated work Category Award Result 2009 Star Wars (John Williams Is The Man) A Cappella Tribute Favorite User Generated Video People's Choice Awards