I was mucking about recently, looking for some good social networking tutorial videos on YouTube when I came across this one. It's not worth watching for content, only for style. You don't need to watch the whole thing.
I think this video is a good example of the modern style of filming, where everything is done with low budget sensibilities. Cameras wiggle and waver, the talent is in an odd position and the script is a slapdash affair if there even is a script. In this case, the script is pretty well done and the information well-organized compared to most of the trash I came across.
This is probably due to the ability of the general populace to film and broadcast their own work. The people producing the videos don't have much training in the art if any at all and don't really care. While it's popular now, I don't think it will last, nor will it be looked back on very fondly a decade or so from now. It's sort of like disco music - simple and repetetive.
As I sifted through mountains of videos discussing social networking, I started leaving comments about the videos I saw. All of them were terrible. Some of them tried to be cute and hip while others were just rambling manifestos about the subject. None of them took the topic or my time seriously. It was perfectly OK to blow the first 30 seconds of the video on music or montages of irrelevant junk. Most of them had no structure at all. I have yet to find a decent one to share at work.
Democratizing information distribution has its downside.
Update: Dig this piece of rubbish:
It's filmed in someone's car with the lighting on the wrong side of the talent. It's simply horrible.
3 comments:
The thing I really hate about these videos is that probably 90% of them would be better if they were just straight text, with *maybe* one or two still images. I really don't want to spend 10 minutes downloading a crappy video over my kind-of-slow home internet connection, and then have to spend another 5 minutes listening to someone ramble on. Especially when all the content could have been just as easily written down as a couple of paragraphs of text, which I could download in a few seconds, and read in less than a minute.
I wish everyone would save the videos for cases that actually need video, like things that are in motion and seeing the motion is key to appreciating it. Can the talking heads, already. I already don't watch TV news because talking heads take way too long to give too little information. Why does the internet have to be like that, too?
Dittos, Tim.
I would love to have seen screencasts, even PowerPoint presentations with a voice over. The lousy camera work detracts so much from what the speakers are trying to present.
I've got a headache.
I blame MTV. Seriously. They were the ones that developed and popularized this sort of DIY video-making back in the early 90s. Think MTV's "Real World" where the camera, actors, conversations and plots were never centered or linear.
Though far more visually appealing and better produced (thus belying the supposed punk ethos it projected) than the garbage it spawned, this style gave everyone the idea that they could make videos, movies, etc.
And "Puck" is still a jerk.
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