Online Screen Production
Online Screen Production is all about Online Screen (i.e. platform) and Screen Production, which I would define it as any screen (motion picture) works that are distributed online, including videos that we uploaded to Facebook, the series of videos that produced by our favourite YouTubers, and even the Instagram Stories that we had skimmed everyday by mobile app, that took a significant place in our everyday life. Compared to Traditional screen media, online screen seems ‘less professional’, where everyone could be the centre of their own film, and presenting a low-budgeted impression to the public, however, its mobility is much higher, that everyone can involved in by just using their own smartphone, as well as, producers could have a more efficient communication with their consumers, providing real-time response by the ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ function of each online platform.
Youtube Channel
YouTube had nowadays become the mainstream platform of online screen production, a place that letting each of us to express our creativity, sharing life experience and to provide information. One day, I realised that I was becoming a YouTube addict, which would checked that if there are any updates from YouTubers that I subscribed everyday once I was back home, which it had a wide range of varieties from tutorials, short films to something just for fun. One of the examples is the channel This Group of People from Taiwan, a group of people who are interested in making films, that their videos are mostly related to daily life, with performing them in a creative way, such as, the different scenarios when visiting relatives, phrases that waiters mostly say, and covering Western pop songs (also the MV) by directly translating them, which could connect to certain qualities that we have discussed in class.
First, as I just mentioned, the channel was formed by a group of amateurs, nobodies who only have the same interest, had not been professionally trained as actors/producers of the TV industry; Second, content of videos online could be completely in random, that there is no limitation on what being created, as the example of the above channel, although their main concept is comedy video, they could still produce music videos with formal quality at the same time, which got far more production options than tradition media platform like TV and cinema screen; Lastly, videos on YouTube could still been irregularly updated even though they are episodic or performing as a series, that there isn’t a fixed protocol regarding this, the update frequency could be either fixed or flexible, and also delays could happened without any notice, which depends on the type of YouTubers, running as individuals or as production companies for instance.
Unlike traditional media, that anything can no longer be changed after a screen work being broadcasted/released, videos on online platform could always be updated and modified in certain extent, in YouTube, we could delete anything we had uploaded at any time, make adjustments to the ‘description’ and settings (where videos can be replaced on Vimeo), and we could even add soundtracks from the YouTube library. In addition, similar to the ‘tag feature’ that being mentioned in Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge, YouTube can let users create their own ‘Playlist’, to organise all their favourite videos into a single list, a public list that keeping all of them in the user’s own page, different from keeping films and TV programmes in the old days that we have to own a physical disc in order to store and to categorise them.