WEEK 8: Video-Blogging
This week we looked at the reading Video Blogging Before Youtube: Situating Video-Blogging. It looked at the pre-Youtube, pre-Social media era of the internet, where amateur video-makers were expressing their creativity and individuality online for the pleasure of content creation. Nowadays, we take for granted the ability to seamlessly stream different media forms across the web, and store unlimited amounts of photos and videos. It was once expensive to distribute media online, whereas now media can be shared, downloaded and re-sued with ease. The ‘early adopters’ of video-blogging often had blog rolls where their content could be found. Sites such as Dailymotion, Vimeo, Blogger and Flickr were all utilised much more frequently. Today, Youtube dominates the market for Vlogging, the evolution of Video-blogging. Video is now generating serious income for many Vloggers — people who were self-taught expressionists are now being offered thousands of dollars by companies to endorse their products or services. This shift of video-blogging in a corporate direction blurs the lines between authenticity and business. Today, there is also increased availability of digital media technologies, recording and editing software, networking platforms and distribution tools igniting a flourishing of creativity amongst amateur and semi-professional media-creators. Being a Youtuber is now a popular and highly successful occupation for many self-taught individuals, and have the popularity of celebrities.
Online video has also transformed into videography often promoted through Instagram. An example of this is videography and production company ‘Good Grief’, who tell stories on a local and global scale with a focus on cinematography and smooth imagery.
I’ve chosen this video from their Instagram for analysis of online video
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba-rSGZh-GD/?hl=en&taken-by=goodgrief
Who is the practitioner (what is their name?) and when were they practicing?
Good Grief Productions. Videographer’s Cam and Henry have been practicing from 2016, shooting brand campaigns, nature and landscape videography and story-telling lives of individuals in a raw cinematic way.
With the photo or video you are examining when was it produced (date)?
November 2nd, 2017.
How was the photo or video authored?
This video was produced with a Cannon XF400 camera, a gimbal and steady-cam for stabilisation. A RODE camera microphone was utilised for clear audio sound of the man being interviewed and also a ring light for clear and vibrant visualisation.
Editing was completed via the use of Adobe, Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom.
How was the photo or video published?
The video was published as a digital source on the Internet. It was published in the medium of video and distributed on multiple channels on the world wide web.
How was the photo or video distributed?
This video was distributed on Instagram as a form of promotion for the company’s website. The video was also published on their Vimeo account. The use of hashtags on their Instagram account such as #videographer #cinematography #documentary #cannon also bring in individuals interested in the topic of videography and cinema.
This example of online video compares drastically to the pre-social media era of video-blogging, where content produced was a lot more organic and unedited. With the evolution of media and the competitive online space of Youtube, individuals who are now known as ‘Vloggers’ perfect their vlogs with professional cameras, extra equipment for stabilisation and microphones for clear audio — however they give the illusion that they are simply whipping out their iPhone or compact camera and filming themselves on the spot… when in fact a lot more thought and planning goes into production. For example, old school video-blogger LONELYGIRL15 simply sat in front of her camera and spoke for minutes on end with content that was visibly unedited and shot in a setting that was not set up specifically for filming.
Online video today, specifically on Instagram, demonstrates how the affordances of Instagram allow individuals to author, publish and distribute content in a much more professional way. You can upload onto your feed videos of 3 minutes in length, upload and save ‘stories’ in the form of video to your page and can even link other links to your videos on other platforms such as Vimeo or Youtube. There are also now limited constraints as Instagram lets you upload content that you can filmed on other devices, allowing users to upload extremely high quality content on the app, whilst giving the illusion that the individual had simply shot the content on Instagram itself. Though this fact is now regularly known by audiences, it adds to the sentiment of Instagram being a space for high quality and unrestricted content.