“Gooood morning San Diego,” Weston Van Soest says as he saunters into the dorm room.
Peeling off his suit jacket and sharing the weather report, he makes himself at home in the unsuspecting resident’s dorm room.
“It is a great day for a nap today,” he says.
He wears no shoes and often wraps up the weather report by lounging in the resident’s bed.
Unpredictable, funny, messy and often at the expense of the resident, Van Soest’s videos have taken social media viewers by storm. Van Soest, a student at PLNU, has organized a wide-range of videos in which he pops in on other students’ rooms unannounced, inviting them to be featured in a comical short. His antics range from his regular “weather report” to inviting a mariachi band to serenade his dorm mates.
Van Soest’s social media breakthrough started with his campaign for Student Senate. Van Soest went for a “Rocky” themed message that shared his vision for “knocking out” Point Loma’s problems.
“Immediately, I had 15 guys come and help me out to make that video,” Van Soest said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, this year’s going to be amazing. This is going to be super fun.’”
That initial collaboration was the start of something much bigger than he and his crew could’ve imagined.
He made social media videos throughout high school for fun, but it wasn’t until he came to PLNU that he realized this was something he could explore more professionally.
“It’s always been something I’ve wanted to pursue, but I never really had the means and the time to do it,” Van Soest said. “But coming into college, this is just such a great time for me to really step into social media content and explore that as a possibility.”
Van Soest comes from a long line of PLNU sea lions, but he’s taken on the challenge to make his own space on the campus.
From that initial “Rocky” video, he and his roommates started brainstorming ideas for social media videos and gathered as many people as they could to go and film them. They quickly zeroed in on a door knocking skit. He credits his roommate for the idea.
“He saw a video online that was another guy doing a video where he knocked on someone’s door and then posed outside of it, and every door they would go to, they would add that person to their group, and they would keep going until it just was this huge group,” Van Soest explained. “And he’s like, ‘Dude, we should make this to be really fun.”
They started out with 4 or 5 people, and they knocked on people’s doors and just posed outside of it. The group grew exponentially, and the sense of fun and community-building was infectious.
“Every person that saw us filming would want to jump in and we ended up with like 25 or 30 people at the end,” Van Soest said. “And that video in itself was really fun to make. But when we posted it, it ended up going viral.”
Van Soest’s next big video was the product of another tip from a PLNU friend. She sent him a video of a guy knocking on someone’s door and then walking into their living space while giving a weather report.
Van Soest initially thought, “That’s a little more outside of my comfort zone, but it would be really funny.”
Fifteen minutes after she sent him the video, he said he made a plan for the skit. He took the idea and ran with it in his own style, which included wearing a suit with a smiley-face print. He went and filmed it.
“That video ended up getting like 60 something million views, and that one was the one that really made everything take off,” Van Soest said.
His unconventional suits have since become a staple — so much so that they now come for free. One of his partnering companies includes OppoSuits.
“We started kind of like a little partnership where I would tag them in some of the posts, and then they would send me more suits and next thing you know it, I have 20 suits that I have to find a space for in my dorm,” Van Soest said.
Expanding on his social media skits, Van Soest decided to major in media communication.
“It’s really opened my eyes, giving me this broader lens of just how much is out there in the media world,” Van Soest said. “And it’s really made me more passionate about it. I think we have an amazing media communications program and our professors are super great and always wanting to help. It’s just such an awesome way of expressing your creativity and in new ways.”
In the culture of social media, going viral can be fleeting. There’s often a sense of wondering what’s next. Van Soest acknowledged the difficulty in learning that lesson.
“As I went along and as things started to progress, I started to feel more pressure in the sense that I was using all these people, always reliant on other people, to help me make the content I was trying to post every day,” Van Soest said. “Different people are telling me to make different types of content.
“It became really stressful and it became a burden. At a certain point, I kind of started to get burned out. I was going through a tough space mentally in this thing that used to be a creative outlet for me, was now kind of, creating a creative block.”
He decided to take a break from content creation. He said in that period of time he really questioned why he was doing this.
“I had a few different people come up to me and kind of affirm me of my content and what I was doing and tell me, ‘The Lord’s hand is all over this, like, I love what you’re doing, and my God loves it too,” Van Soest said. “And up until that point, I had not felt that way.”
It might seem far-fetched to have God’s blessing over social media content, but for Van Soest he says it’s a form of Christian outreach — his content attempts to show a different side of college. What started as fun and games has become much more.
“I would say the big stigma behind college life, especially on social media, is partying,” Van Soest said. “I think that there’s not a lot of representation for what other aspects of college are other than just partying in school. It’s really cool that me and my friends are able to showcase that you can have a great time in college, and you can meet a lot of people without being in the party scene.”
Van Soest said he credits a lot to Hendricks Hall — which he considers not just a living space, but a family.
“Hendricks is just such a fun, awesome community of mostly outgoing people who just love to have fun,” Van Soest said. “The best way I could describe it in one word is like a family, because there’s no friendship boundaries. It’s just such a welcoming community where I feel like everyone just fits in and everyone belongs, which is something that I haven’t experienced in my life.”
Residents he dropped in on in early videos have since become close friends.
When Van Soest was named Instagram creator of the month in April, he described his content as whimsical, unpredictable and revolutionary. These words are descriptors of the energetic student voice he’s bringing into the digital world and the visibility of a Christian college campus.
“It’s like giving a completely different take on college and what college is,” Van Soest said. “It’s also just like a form of content that’s never really been done. I don’t know any other creators who create in the same space that I’m creating. So it’s just a different concept. And in that I think it kind of embodies the word revolutionary.”
To see more of Van Soest’s videos, follow him on @westonvansoest.
