Any Vloggers? The Canon M5

[Hanriverprod]

I'm not saying any of these are great content but it's definitely not a person sitting in one spot talking into a camera. Now a lot of them start off with a person speaking into the camera but that's to setup what they will do that day.

 

[fuzzynormal]

Well, as you hinted at, I find those vids all annoying.

Those "vlogs" are basically informing me that I need to accept that I'm now an old -- 'kuz I really don't get it.

Thats fine.

I can't begin to explain how grateful I am for that. It's just not my speed.

Y'all do your thing.  Be successful among your peers. Exploit your privilege. Worry about the stuff you worry about.

Especially cameras.  You guys do more with them than I do anyway...

Alrighty.  I'm gonna go play Yahtzee with my grandmother. 

[SR]

I found the early days of sitting-in-front-of-the-camera vlogging style rather painful to watch. It was only after I saw Casey's work that I started enjoying vlogging (he's an exception for me even now). Here's a video that tries to make a case for him.
 

 

 

[Policar]

I don't generally watch vlogs, but the above video makes a pretty good case for them.

I think if you go back to Bazin or even look at some of Lévi-Strauss and Sanders Peirce's ideas on semiotics that inform him and the Cahiers, you begin to reexamine what film is uniquely good at and why it became such a popular medium in the first place–and its strengths lie in its ability to record a convincing record of life, a recording of something that actually happened that feels real. Film shares this with audio recording and photography, but film takes it to another level. Unlike literature or painting or animation, it's not a symbol or a drawing, it's a record of something that actually happened in front of a camera. So way before you even worry about lighting or blocking or editing or even storytelling, what film does that's unique and remarkable is that it provides a lifelike and moving record of an event. Modern blockbusters move away from this tendency because they rely so heavily on CGI and animation and compositing that it begins to feel like a video game (which they're imitating; they share a common audience). I think you feel that modern blockbusters are different, and I definitely prefer action movies from before CGI became so commonplace because they feel more physical to me. Mad Max got a good reception because it was a bit more physical. Maybe part of the increasing appeal of MMA fighting (and historically the appeal of sports) is the you get back to that physicality.

Now we're at that stage where the eight year old girl (or whatever Coppola said) finally has the resources to tell a story affordably with film. We'e got dSLRs and iPhones and we're making movies instead of just watching them. And I think two tendencies are emerging from that. One is to imitate what we're watching in theaters, and the other is sort of to break off from it. This website is definitely more for imitators, trying to get something that looks expensive for cheap. And I don't find any of the work I've seen posted on this website to be any more interesting than what it's imitating. Some is more technically adept than the rest, but mostly it's a bunch of music videos and montages meant to showcase a new lens or something and it's basically a bunch of camera tests. Which is cool, that's a cool hobby, and it's fun to engage with and it's good to know what gear is out there so you can do your thing–make art, money whatever with it, once you get bored with camera tests. So the work doesn't interest me, but it's still a worthy topic.

Neither does vlogging interest me, and in fact it interests me less, but I still think it deserves respect because it's doing something new and unique and compelling. Hence the enormous emerging audience... Vlogging goes in the exact opposite direction, back toward cinema verité and away from blockbusters. And verité, unlike direct cinema, acknowledges the camera, which I think is sort of the film step in presenting "reality." Which, if you'd ask Bazin, is the point. Vlogging brings that to the next level. And yeah it's obnoxious like Michael Moore is obnoxious because the filmmaker becomes his own protagonist and you might not like him. But it's cool to watch stuff people are doing and imagine you're doing it. It's even cooler to imagine you're also the filmmaker recording it. And vlogs let you engage with content on both of those levels. Even something like Rocket Jump (which is more in the "imitating mainstream media" category than vloggers are) makes the entire process from funding to production to distribution transparent to the viewer and encourages the viewer to do it, too. So you're watching their content but separate from that you're relating to it as a potential filmmaker. To me, this is really cool. Most kickstarter campaigns are dumb money grabs, but with something like Rocket Jump it becomes an alternative form of financing that's communicating directly with the audience and that's cool. All the BTS elements there are cool. (The photography tutorials and stuff that pollute YouTube aren't–because 99% of them are just promoting horrible information and lowest common denominator aesthetics.) The BTS elements of vlogging remind me of a film nerd sneaking on set and reading Fangoria or American Cinematographer or watching the dvd deleted scenes... except it's going even way further than that. 

YouTube kind of fulfills the promise of verité, and to some extent realizes the potential of cinema itself on a very very basic level–even if the content is generally not my thing and I'd argue usually pretty awful. Snapchat and Vine do, too. More than that, they allow you to be the consumer and the producer, so you get a real community. But most people are boring. And most content is boring. If it's democratized, more of it will be boring. Painting wasn't great during the renaissance because it was cheap, you know? Painting got worse when it was democratized. So while I think your Snapchat or YouTube channel can be really banal and millennial and shitty and most of them are... that's the content, not the medium. The medium itself is really cool and there are some YouTube channels and Vimeo channels I enjoy and to trash the medium because most of it is garbage would make me a hypocrite because I really love some of it.

I think if we feel alienated by these media it's a pretty boring response to just imitate an outdated one instead unless you really commit and say–okay, I'm holding myself to the standard of my heroes. I'm not content shooting with a camera that maybe they used or has the same resolution of one they used, I don't really care about that at all. I'm going to challenge myself to do with my resources better than they could do with them, or if not better than more personal to my vision. And that's the approach successful vloggers are taking. Like it or not, the cutting edge of documentary is YouTube and Snapchat. I'm not going to say vlogging is a better pursuit than shooting a documentary for the festival scene. I will say I think how you evaluate each has more to do with how you feel about its audience than anything else, and at that point it's a social issue, not a technical or theoretical or aesthetic one.

Edit: I think this website produces some good camera tests, however. The "feel" of the image is more than its specs and going out and shooting with a given camera or set of LUTs gives you an interesting window into their potential that specs alone can't.

[maxer15]

Love taking my Canon PowerShot G7 X everywhere with me these days. If you're planning on taking vlogging serious then you definitely need to get one with a flip screen. If your stuck for ideas then check out this guide to them - https://vlogplanet.com/best-vlogging-camera-with-flip-screen-review/

Can pretty much get any type of camera to go the job though if you don't have the budget...