Honey, we need to talk about the kids...

[Phil A]

Obviously that "everyday life vlogging" is really big and to be honest, like most of you, I can't really understand the appeal. My girlfriend watches Jamie&Nikki a lot and I just can't get over how that's basically just watching two random people do their every day blah. They have a million followers who care  about what boring, regular things they do.

I mean, I can kinda get why people watch Jon Olson, he's at least a ka-razy semi-celebrity, blowing money and living the life, so you watch him do stuff most of us will never do (still working on saving up for that lambo). You'd also think there's only so many ways you could go about contouring but make-up how-to channels are such a huge thing.

At the same time you can see that usually production value is of no real interest to a lot of people. Same with Instagram, there's a lot of people with hundreds of thousands of followers with just the same composition of iPhone pictures over and over and over again. It's more about people's voyeuristic needs and identifying with the content creator than with the actual content.

 

When it comes to technology, I kinda get why less might be more. I wanted to see how the GH5 fares by looking at what gets uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube and by god, if I have to see another video that is 100% slow motion flowers / dogs / people shopping I will scream! It's approaching "cooking video with ukulele background sound" territory. It seems that a lot of people who care about "filmic, cinematic videos" exclusively produce camera test videos. Gear is the purpose in itself, there will never be any output. That's actually also fine as a hobby but there's the tendency that these people only criticize and never create/contribute.

I'm actually really re-evaluating what I want in a camera. Maybe I can do with "worse" image if it actually means I'll shoot more due to better usability?

[Chrad]

I think it's important to remember that people have different expectations when it comes to aesthetics and production standards when they sit down to watch a narrative than when they watch essentially video diaries of people talking to the camera.

[Jim Giberti]

It's pretty much the same with TV isn't it (and hulu, netflix etc.)?

There's a strong market for creative narrative. In fact you could say it's a hayday (boy am i old) for it. From GOT to Walking Dead and on and on. At the same time there's a proliferation of reality based programming with little attention to aesthetic and shitty, banal content from Honey Boo Boo to the Biggest Loser to the Orange Stain in the Whitehouse.

But there are real markets for both.

[Kisaha]

In general, I really admire young kids openness and creativity, but as always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Education and experience must have a balance, and just watching youtube videos is not exactly education. Also, as I say in Greek "είναι τέχνη και τεχνική" = "it is both, art and technic".

In Greek, the word "art" has an Indo-European root, and it means "ξυλουργώ", meaning "woodwork" or "carpentry", "woodcraft" or "woodworking". Where artistic starts, or where technical ends, is really vague. The first religious woodcrafts, totems or statues were artistic inspirations but very technical to made with limited tools.

My second interpretation is that it is just a phase of the turn of our epoch. Everything right now is forming the next age, it is something after the social media, but we are not exactly sure what is going to be. Do not forget, after the Athenian democracy, the only democracy ever, probably, we had more than 1500 years of autocracy, Kings and Queens, and a 1000 years middle age in Europe, probably the darkest period in humanity. You can always can go forward, but also can go backwards, now we are somehow in the middle, it seems that we are going backwards, just before World War 1 or 2, we will see what is going to happen.

A more simpler and plain explanation is that this is reality YouTube, remember when reality TV was the bees knees? Now it is happening on the internet.

Younger generations have been used to "share" their life on the internet, I remember people where having status updates on their facebook accounts every 3 minutes (I don't have one, but I see people doing it all the time). "Now I read", "now I have a cup of coffee", "now I go to the toilet - I am having number 2 " etc etc

At some point, privacy will come back to reality and people will start thinking about their own lives. Also, there are people that would be always interested in other people's lives, because their own are not satisfactory. These people used to consume drags and be self destructive, now consume reality TV and videos, same thing, different substance.

The most scary stuff is young kids, communicate entirely with emoticons and sound messages on Viber, absolutely lack of written words. My nieces had a table for a young age, but with very limited use and not allowed to have mobile phones, and they do not ask for one.

Again, experience is great, but to face the world sufficiently and with respect to the vast differences of our planetic village, we have to comprehend the basic human condition, concentrate on the similarities, and build a better world.

@Jim Giberti Yesterday, I was watching the last episode of Walking Dead, not very good. GOT some times is so predictable and boring, great production, but I came to the conclusion that one very good feature film, can shape a whole culture. Production values isn't the best.

I have a lot of box sets of TV series, I haven't even put one for a second time, not even once, except "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place" and the "Nathan Barley"!

My favorite right now is "The Expanse", let's see where it goes!

[fuzzynormal]

2 hours ago, Kisaha said:

In general, I really admire young kids openness and creativity, but as always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Education and experience must have a balance, and just watching youtube videos is not exactly education. Also, as I say in Greek "είναι τέχνη και τεχνική" = "it is both, art and technic".

In Greek, the word "art" has an Indo-European root, and it means "ξυλουργώ", meaning "woodwork" or "carpentry", "woodcraft" or "woodworking". Where artistic starts, or where technical ends, is really vague. The first religious woodcrafts, totems or statues were artistic inspirations but very technical to made with limited tools.

My second interpretation is that it is just a phase of the turn of our epoch. Everything right now is forming the next age, it is something after the social media, but we are not exactly sure what is going to be. Do not forget, after the Athenian democracy, the only democracy ever, probably, we had more than 1500 years of autocracy, Kings and Queens, and a 1000 years middle age in Europe, probably the darkest period in humanity. You can always can go forward, but also can go backwards, now we are somehow in the middle, it seems that we are going backwards, just before World War 1 or 2, we will see what is going to happen.

A more simpler and plain explanation is that this is reality YouTube, remember when reality TV was the bees knees? Now it is happening on the internet.

Younger generations have been used to "share" their life on the internet, I remember people where having status updates on their facebook accounts every 3 minutes (I don't have one, but I see people doing it all the time). "Now I read", "now I have a cup of coffee", "now I go to the toilet - I am having number 2 " etc etc

At some point, privacy will come back to reality and people will start thinking about their own lives. Also, there are people that would be always interested in other people's lives, because their own are not satisfactory. These people used to consume drags and be self destructive, now consume reality TV and videos, same thing, different substance.

The most scary stuff is young kids, communicate entirely with emoticons and sound messages on Viber, absolutely lack of written words. My nieces had a table for a young age, but with very limited use and not allowed to have mobile phones, and they do not ask for one.

Again, experience is great, but to face the world sufficiently and with respect to the vast differences of our planetic village, we have to comprehend the basic human condition, concentrate on the similarities, and build a better world.

@Jim Giberti Yesterday, I was watching the last episode of Walking Dead, not very good. GOT some times is so predictable and boring, great production, but I came to the conclusion that one very good feature film, can shape a whole culture. Production values isn't the best.

I have a lot of box sets of TV series, I haven't even put one for a second time, not even once, except "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place" and the "Nathan Barley"!

My favorite right now is "The Expanse", let's see where it goes!

I just watched one of my favorite films of all time yesterday. Technically it's flawed, but who cares when the story is just so good?

I mean, as an example, watch 70's American cinema --the films from that era that have stood the test of time. They're not still around because what they captured was pristine. (Although some of it still looks incredible) But mostly it's still relevant because of the stories. 

Making something that persists into the future and has some sort of narrative resonance may be wishful thinking on my part, but in this final stage of my career, I'm at least gonna try. 

...and "content" doesn't factor into that effort. 

[Tim Sewell]

5 hours ago, HelsinkiZim said:

I argue that in a few years the people that can produce the best image in a fastest way (auto everything) will be finally making a decent buck, as the productiin budget bubble bursts for hollywood films.

That may or not be a 'good thing', but I don't think it will happen to any great degree. Movie stars are movie stars and, no matter what you think of them individually, each have a 'something' that most people don't (and I probably include a few vloggers in roughly the same category). My point is that those very rare people will continue to command vast fees, which means that professional, talented, experienced production people will always be in demand - to be entirely sure that you'll get exactly the right stuff in the can in the amount of the talent's time you can pay for, you can afford those people more than you can afford to go auto-everything.

[tweak]

Thinking that some Vlogging kids have a better chance of making money or holding down a decent wage than you would be a silly assumption to make imo.
100,000 views on Youtube between a 3 person Vlog channel is nothing. The market is saturated, there's so many people out there all trying to do the same thing, breaking through at this point isn't exactly easy. If you're an early adopter and can get started on something before others (like Casey) you might have some easier path to success, but as soon as it's a known thing being a professional in any given field is just as hard as each other. With Vlogging instead of focusing on great images you may now just have to focus on making a ton of content, which I'd argue is just as hard as focusing on great images and less rewarding.

[fuzzynormal]

10 hours ago, tweak said:

Thinking that some Vlogging kids have a better chance of making money or holding down a decent wage than you would be a silly assumption to make imo.

On the other hand, doing work-for-hire can be a creatively unrewarding slog too.

[tweak]

5 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

On the other hand, doing work-for-hire can be a creatively unrewarding slog too.

No doubt.

[hmcindie]

On ‎4‎/‎5‎/‎2017 at 7:08 AM, fuzzynormal said:

Here's my take:  "Content" is its own word. "Filmmaker" is a different one.  The latter needn't concern themselves too much about the former. 

I respect content creators for YouTube --as I don't have the motivation to do it, but "content" is not really art; it's not really filmmaking, is it?

Well what I've realized is that those content creators go "farther" (or more sideways) in life and the filmmakers get stuck in technical jobs. Content creators become producers, writers directors. Filmmakers with a technical eye become... engineers. They do the nitty gritty that the content creator asks.

On ‎4‎/‎5‎/‎2017 at 8:49 PM, Phil A said:

At the same time you can see that usually production value is of no real interest to a lot of people.

Even in the "bizz" (not the vlog environment but actual tv-production side where technical skills are really needed) the production value varies A LOT depending on the production. It's not like everyone working for telly/cinema is doing hugely creative and/or very high production value things where as vloggers are not. Sometimes I see better production quality in vlogs than on tv.

If you guys wanna work "cinema" then the route is really small. High budget commercial ads are for some people "the thing" but even landing those gigs as a director requires a shit ton of creativity as in "I'm gonna type a thousand treatments".

[fuzzynormal]

11 hours ago, hmcindie said:

content creators go "farther" (or more sideways) in life and the filmmakers get stuck in technical jobs. Content creators become producers, writers directors. Filmmakers with a technical eye become... engineers. They do the nitty gritty that the content creator asks.

My thought is that we all fall into the roles we decide for ourselves.  If you like playing with camera knobs, you focus on that.  If you'd rather tell a story, you focus on that... and lots of values in between. 

For instance, trying to break away from my established ( read: lazy ) career path is not easy.  Essentially, my time has been spent being a passable craftsperson, but not a terribly impressive creative.  So to switch priorities is difficult.  Having the confidence to actually tell a worthwhile story, develop an interesting cinematic voice, and shape the tone of stories with wise choices is so much more demanding than figuring out colors of skintone, you know? 

Because of that, falling back into thought processes that are a distraction from successful storytelling happens because dabbling with the tech is more comfortable.

( after all, look at my writing here )

So, to be fair, kids doing "content" are often just trying to figure stuff out -- while meanwhile so much of "content" is not exactly narratively creative.  Sort of a double whammy, that.  Those that truly have an itch for telling stories should eventually get there, but you're right, it's easy to go sideways with tech and lose sight of a more interesting career.  That's my anecdotal experience for sure.