02 Feb 2022 Third grader has become YouTube Kids animator

By Becky Bell

Charlie Schell has a big imagination and likes to constantly create. And at age 9, she has a YouTube channel called MoonCloud.

She attends Morrilton Elementary School in the South Conway School District and is the daughter of Brian and Rachel Schell.

Brian teaches at Morrilton Intermediate School. Rachel helps companies with social media support and online training by creating videos and graphics.

The third-grader paid attention to what her parents were working on and picked up skills quickly. 

“Charlie has always loved computers and technology,” Rachel said. “I work from home, so she would want to come and see what I was working on. One day when she was about 5, she saw me working on a video and said, ‘How did you do that? Where did the music come from? How did you make it move that way?’”

After working with her mother for a few months, Charlie made a video about wolves with music and images. She said that wolves are some of her favorite animals, and she creates them as characters on her YouTube Kids channel frequently.

“I really like dogs, but I also like wolves because I like that they have packs and I like that they are families and work together,” she said. “My main character is a wolf. My second favorite are foxes. My two other characters are foxes.”

Although Rachel has been a designer for years, she said that the videos and artwork that Charlie made before she got on YouTube Kids taught her things she didn’t know.

“Technology is amazing, and she doesn’t have a computer like mine. She has a Chromebook,” Rachel said. “I have professional software and licensed professional tools, so we started looking for free apps and things she could download. She has taught me about some amazing tools. Once she got that going for a year and a half, she asked me about YouTube because she was becoming aware of social media.”

Rachel said she and her husband talked to Charlie about YouTube Kids and agreed to allow her to have her own channel if they oversaw it and gave her permission when she could go online.

“Charlie really wanted to be on Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok, but I have a YouTube channel and I knew we could create a YouTube Kids video and monitor it and it would be safe,” she said. “It’s like a kid’s channel for kids only. So that’s a safety feature built in and how she started this journey.”

Working her way into having a YouTube channel was challenging at first, but Charlie is proud of the progress she has made with her skillset of designs and videos.

“I didn’t think I would be able to start doing my videos for a while,” she said. “I thought (Mom) knew everything about animating, but it was kind of cool when I started teaching her a few things about animations I do and stuff.”

One of the main things she does on YouTube is post videos about a game called WildCraft, which includes wild animals in the forests. There is a giant community following and she animates all the characters in her game, Rachel said.

Charlie has been taking piano lessons for the past year at Conway Institute of Music. If she doesn’t become an animator or a pianist, Charlie would like to become a singer or a jewelry maker.

But for now, she will enjoy all her hobbies, especially those that involve creating a world for her characters on YouTube Kids.