RSS feedI won’t be an Aussie – Nigel Kennedy
The world’s most famous violinist, Nigel Kennedy, has abandoned plans to become an Australian citizen in protest at the country’s role in the war in Iraq. (Nigel’s my personal favourit violinist too)
While the evilvlog glitterati drop poo pies on unsuspecting commoners from their ivory towers, we the people are shooting video and putting it on the Internet.
I participate in a Yahoo email group (which anyone can join) which discusses videblogging theory, and in reply to a discussion about the importance of cat videos (yeah, go figure), Michael Meiser, a web site developer, incorrectly attributed to me a comment that…
the number of political videoblogs pale in comparison to videos of people’s cats
Not only did he get the author wrong, but strangely enough proceeded to misinterpret the statement (above) as meaning that I (not the person who actually wrote it) thought that cat videos are more popular than political videos, and proceeded to argue the point.
Anyways, in my quite congenial reply, I stupidly mentioned how I thought that Evilvlog was a site where videobloggers could air their works without spoiling their own sites, and that this in a way was just audience retention, and flew in the face of “just putting shit out there”, and thus contradicted their raison detre. My bad.
It was a mistake to state my opinion in front of Michael, because he then went on a fairly long tirade about how fantastic Evilvlog is, and that I just don’t get it. My subsequent reply to which, he decided to post on Evilvlog, which you can read at Evilvlog = College humor.
Michael then proceeded to post a fairly scathing and quite nasty 253 line reply to the original theory list, implying that I was basically a nobody who should start a vlog, and that I was attacking all the editors of Evilvlog personally and thus “insulting many of the core and original members of vlogging itself”. Scary stuff, to be threatened as not being a somebody. Far be it from me to challenge the norms of videoblogging, right? Especially several Evilvlog editors who I hold in very high regard.
Now Michael chose not to reply to me in a public space, but instead sent his 253 line novella to the same email list “behind a membership-only firewall (of course)”, a comment with which he appended to the bottom of my email he posted to Evilvlog, I’m assuming as an attempt to belittle me. I’m not going to return the favour and post all of his replies in a public space however. I’d probably run out of bandwidth anyway.
So, to the point of this post… My email has been posted to Evilvlog completely out of context, at the height of a heated discussion from both sides of the argument, and presented in a way to perhaps denegrate me, and due to pure spite on behalf of Michael Meiser, because I do not share his views. Maybe this fits with their reason for existing, I don’t really know, but if it is, then perhaps they need to take a more detailed look at what their site is actually about. And if all the editors of Evilvlog support his view, then the videoblogging community is in a very sorry state indeed.
In fact by posting my email to Evilvlog out of context, with editorial comment, Michael has ironically imitated the very media they say they are challenging, in that it puts me in a quite indefensible position, due to the supposed popularity of the site, and the “respectable names” who are editors for the site.
I really hate having to air my dirty laundry on my blog, but unfortunately Michael left me no choice but to at least say something in my defence. Aint the ‘net wonderful…
My Every frame has its purpose post got me thinking about how to produce video without my head influencing my editing decisions, so that the resulting video is a real snap shot of life or at least me without my videoblogging persona.
I have a few personal rules by which I videoblog, and one is that I use the same MiniDV tape over and over until it wears out, which forces me to be strict with the amount of footage I shoot, and how long I leave it before I edit. I also try not to keep track of what is where on the tape, which also helps enforce the “edit now” edict.
So I wrote a program to generate 10 completely random edit points, which I then used to log clips from my 60 minute work tape. For reference, although they’re totally useless to you, the random edits were:
- 25:08:00 for 39 seconds
- 39:53:00 for 34 seconds
- 33:37:00 for 57 seconds
- 55:41:00 for 27 seconds
- 21:46:00 for 34 seconds
- 08:55:00 for 7 seconds
- 26:01:00 for 44 seconds
- 42:48:00 for 48 seconds
- 17:15:00 for 6 seconds
- 34:41:00 for 19 seconds
There’s some interesting selections, including some footage from projects outside of my videoblogging, and I’ve masked the faces of the police who I shot (read: videoed) on Christmas day. Apart from that, I accepted everything that was selected by the random number generator, including the passer by saying “Keep an eye on the fascists, dude!”, which I so wanted to include in a vlog, but didn’t know how.
If you’re using the same recycled tape technique, then why not post a video of your own, using the same edit points as above, and tag it in mefeedia as randomedits.
The enclosed video is what I assume is the world’s first completely random computer generated videoblog post. Read into it what you will, because there certainly aint no narrative.
In any novel, play or film, every scene, every movement, every word, is there for a reason. And in film, especially when every frame is so expensive with respect to dollars and time to tell a story, every frame is there for a reason. Whether it be required by the narrative, to construct characters, motive and objective, or for emotive, themic or artistic reasons, every frame has its purpose.
Throughout history, we as an audience have been treated to content carefully manufactured for us, and as such we are trained to subconsciously accept every frame as part of a grand design by the director or artist.
Compare this to amateur video, or videoblogging, where people untrained in the art of editing for profit, are producing videos which challenge the way every commercial audiovisual medium we’ve ever seen, has been created.
It is partly* through this conditioning that I believe we are able to tell the difference between amateur and professional content.
You could argue that videobloggers are the same, in that every frame is selected by the creator. But with amateur editing technique, poor storytelling ability, limited understanding of frame by frame selection and no requirement for profit making**, videoblogs more often than not break the mould of what we expect and are used to, because they include segments of content which we feel has no reason for inclusion. Perhaps this is partly why people are quick to dismiss videoblogging as boring, monotonous, and home videos on the Internet, and why it is still content makers, artists, and people less conditioned, that are the majority of the audience.
Is it a surprise then, that the videoblogs we find interesting or entertaining, such as Chasing Windmills, Human Dog or Ryanne’s Video Blog, are either produced by experienced and/or professional writers and editors, and are more often than not scripted or planned in a fair amount of detail.
We keep saying to ourselves (as videobloggers) that we are different to big media, because we are showing real life. The problem with this is that real life is predictably linear in time, and unless you shoot a single scene without any edits, you’re not shooting real life, you’re making editing decisions based on your time limit and what you think is good art or narrative. In effect, you’ve already started down the path to creating content for a conditioned audience, who now expect you to complete your journey “to the dark side” and compete with other carefully constructed content for attention.
Is there a way to make video content which does not conform to the constructed content norms? This is why Adrian Miles‘ work is so exciting.
The question that I keep asking myself is, are we as an audience changing what we will accept as interesting content, thus validating the call for citizen media and videoblogging to take over the media, or are we stuck in a short term fad where the excitement of producing content and posting it on the Internet to an equally fad driven audience, has blinded us to the fact that we still make amateur and uninteresting content? If you will, we are blinded by the fad itself.
And in closing, will the still conditioned majority, ever see past the fad and embrace videoblogging as a mass audience? Unfortunately I tend to think not, and in fact as cream usually rises to the top, so will those videobloggers who have both the narrative and technical skills which bring them closest to the idealism of every frame has a purpose. I’m already starting to see the trend, as the vlogs I regularly watch, are higher up the experience and quality chain than Joe Blow on the street uploading home videos to the Internet.
Discuss. 🙂
* There are obviously other reasons as well.
** At least in theory, because I think the majority of videobloggers are secretly hoping their content will eventually bring them income.
By STEVEN JOHNSON
While making the eleventh day of Christmas video, I discovered a haunted egg.
Over the Christmas/New Year week, the neighbour decided to play his bass for about 7 days straight. I don’t mind the odd bit of loud thumping bass, but when he started playing along to latin dance for a few days, it began to piss me off. So how pleased I was that he suddenly switched to the old Sex Pistols classic.
I’m not a big fan of Christmas and New Year’s, in case you couldn’t tell, so I spent time at home with Singleton. He wasn’t particularly happy about it.
This video is part of a backlog from stumbling into the twelve days of Christmas for the last… ooh, twelve days or so. I just put together the first day of Christmas one afternoon because I had some spare footage I couldn’t think how to use, specifically the police and the posters, which I shot on Christmas day while walking around my local deserted area. Stupidly, that meant coming up with a new one each day, without realising how difficult the higher numbers were going to be. Anyway, what’s done is done. The amusing thing is, amongst all the video I spit out, especially all the what I think is interesting stuff, it took a parody of the twelve days of Christmas to bring in the next bunch of viewers. Yum, just in time to piss them off!
This coming week I’m editing a non-Internet project anyway, so the backlog will help keep the vlog active at least. I also have a full version of the twelve days, which I’ll post next month, once everyone has forgotten about it, and a few other interesting surprises over the next few weeks.