Well I keep filming me. In front my camera talking. I am making good friends with it.
And it's kind of cathartic. Just what stops me from plonking it on the computer. I really enjoy editing. That's fun.
I guess the real crux of is that I know my videos are boring and even though i can now cut an hour's recording in to 5 minutes of something that is a relatively cohesive video, I just know I am really boring and I am just adding to the problem of vloggers on the internet. people just talking.
And I noticed this particularly when an advert popped up advertising that new youtube girl whose name I forgot. And what got me was that this advert for her channel was just her describing what she wanted for her videos, describing herself as crazy, then it turns out she was just very boring and copying what other youtubers do without the need to describe themselves as "weird". And it got me thinking, someone who is quite clearly in their 20's describing them self as weird got me really confused. From basically being an internet dweller to actually trying out vlogging myself and I have come to the conclusion that the hard bit about making videos is not the editing or what you do with it. The hard bit is making content worth watching.
And here why the whole weird thing got me confused. Here is someone who clearly in on youtube for some reason and yet she is resorting to methods which would make her content really boring. Not funny, or entertaining or at all engaging. How is doing a cinnamon or a milk challenge actually any of those things. how is it worth my time? And the simple answer is that it isn't. We watch the cinnamon challenge because all the reactions are basically the same "over the top" coughing and spluttering and yet people find it funny or in some way, it makes the viewers feel better about themselves. And after the first couple of hundred, people just stopped watching. Yet challenge youtubers still exist.
Do I feel my content is worth watching. Well no I don't. I think I make crap videos because I am just a guy in front of a camera talking, saying words and not doing anything at all. And that in of it's self is the same problem as youtubers doing challenges to engage the audience. If anyone would watch my videos, it would be to make them self feel better. And that is why someone like Danisnotonfire is now so successful, because he tells stories in such a way that it makes us feel better. But he also includes his audience.
Benjamin Cook becoming youtube documentary is really what started my deeper thoughts on youtube. His "girls on youtube" video, he said that there aren't as many popular female vloggers. And he is right. There are not many popular female vloggers in comparison to boys whose key demographics seem to be girls aged 13-17. Now I need not actually go further on that point because it is mostly self explanatory why these boys have that particular audience.
But the popular female vloggers, whilst they exist, they are not in abundance. So Ben finished his video pleading for these girls to make videos, but to make sure they were good.
A fair request. Make good videos. But now I have reached a point where I don't know how to make good things on my own. I can't try something new because most of it is already been done to death. Crabsticks even did a panel show and when youtube as a platform achieves this, it is a scary concept to actually think about. That people are achieving this level of production and coordination.
So the light in our eyes is the exact reason why we can be put off by making videos. Which brings me back around to advert girl. She took every popular video by people who had already made it and re-did it on her channel in her way. Whilst this is not wrong, in fact it's applaud-able, the problem is found in the extent to which people to do it. And I think it is a result of believing that to get to the top of youtube, you must be popular, and to be popular you must do popular things. Thus ending up in a repetitive stream of "content", which is "quantity over quality".
I wish to rely on the quality part of youtube, because it the new, weird and wonderful things that make people popular, not the set rule book. So, I think it's time I focused more on writing my own scripts, throwing them out and then doing a new one. IT's long, hard, boring, and worst of all, really demoralising.
BUT! If it means that I output better work, then maybe what I can achieve through is approval of more than just my close friends on my work.
"so like, comment & subscribe if you liked that and want to see more of that"
(I hate that phrase so much, if you need to tell someone to do that, why are they on you'r vidoes!!)
No comments:
Post a Comment