Colleen Yu films her grandmother's ICU room and a brand campaign with the same care

The internet is full of people filming their lives. Almost all of it is either a highlight reel or a confession, and both get boring fast because both are performances of a mood. Colleen Yu does something rarer and harder: she films the actual thing, including the parts with no good angle, and she cuts it like a film rather than a diary entry.

Her grandmother was in the ICU ten days before her wedding, and she filmed it. Her father cried at that wedding, the first time she had seen it, and she filmed that too. Her grandmother made it out of the hospital, and that is in there as well. Around those sit a haircut in Japan, a brand campaign, a bubble caught mid-air. The tonal range would break most creators. She holds it because she is not switching modes, she is applying the same eye to everything.

The rule in the bio

Her stated filter is the best creative constraint we have come across in a while: act like your younger self is watching. It does the work that authenticity discourse usually fails to do, because it is specific and it is uncomfortable. Your younger self would not be impressed by the brand deal. Your younger self would notice if you got cynical. It is a standard rather than an aesthetic, and it is why the personal work does not curdle into content.

Her community is literally called Our Younger Selves, and the phrase she uses about the method is that there is universal in the personal. That is an old idea in documentary filmmaking and a nearly extinct one online, where the incentive runs the other way: generalize, broaden, chase the algorithm. She keeps going narrower, and 483,000 people keep showing up because the specific thing is the thing that lands.

The businesses underneath

The half people miss is that she is a builder, not just a filmmaker. Girls Get Bags and Ripple are both hers, running alongside the film work, plus a bootcamp, a storefront, and a Substack she describes as a museum of thoughts. The emotional filmmaking is the front door; there is an actual company behind it.

And there is the household: she is engaged to Brendan, the hardware engineer building portals in a workshop until Disney notices. One of them makes impossible objects, the other makes anything look like a film. We are choosing to find that delightful rather than unfair.

Start with the wedding footage. It will take four minutes and you will feel something, which is the entire claim she is making.

There is universal in the personal.

Colleen, which is the whole method in five words