Today I was going through some old files and found this “videoblog” from the summer of 2001. It never actually got posted in a blog post but it was linked on the sidebar of my blog back then. What really suprised me about it was the “spirit” of the piece. It’s very videoblogging.
How this video ended up to be was that I was playing another game with myself to help me make more work. This game consisted of carrying my video camera with me everywhere. In this case it was to lunch at Taco Haven (before they remolded it). That game didn’t last too long because my Sony Digital 8, circa 1999 is too damn big to carry all the time.
So what do you think, those of you who didn’t like Richard BF’s take on what a videoblog is? Does this video now magically become a videoblog because it’s video in a blog or has it been a videoblog all along?
11 Comments
I like this. It is taking the ordinary and making it interesting.
As for was it a videoblog before I guess maybe you can call it that. I tend to still have as part of my definition the idea of journaling, the idea of recording a personal history. I guess similar to what Richard call snapshots of life. I like this aspect of video blogging but I don’t neccesarily think that some of the other things excluded are not video blogs. I guess I say that cause it is not a law anywhere that vlogs must be done a certain way or with certain restrictions. If someone is making money from their content, or is being influenced by a larger mainstream media company it may still be a video blog it is just a commercial video blog and I will watch it differently than I watch a personal video blog. Maybe the comparison can be akin to reading the comic section of a newspaper opposed to the editorials. Just a thought and maybe not the greatest analogy.
Whatever you call this video. I’m glad you shared it. Thanks.
Only now does it become a videoblog. Before now it was home video.
Matt, I totally disagree. I think it looks nothing like a home video and was certainly shot and edited with a completely different intention.
Amateur movie, home movie, home video, whatever. It’s in the home mode of visual representation, more or less. Are all the home movies I made before the internet became capable of supporting them videoblogs before the fact? I think not. Home mode artifacts only become videoblogs once they’ve entered the space of the network. If anything, your video proves the exact opposite of what you say it does, i.e. that videoblogging can’t be defined by its mode of address or content.
Maybe I should post something on the matter, but do I really want to enter the fray again? Do I, Michael? Do I?
Look, this video was made for the web. It only exists as a quicktime movie, I just transcoded it from Sorenson to h.264. It was posted on the web just not technically on a blog. Part of my point is that this video was make in a maner in in the spirit of videoblogging 3 1/2 years before I started posting videos to my blog. If I had left that bit of information out nobody would think it anything other than my latest post on my videoblog. So I think it totally supports the idea that videoblogging can’t be defined by being only “video in a blog.”
Look at this other post of mine. Is that a videoblog because it’s video in a blog? I don’t think so. It’s a short film posted to my blog. It was never intended as anything but that. I don’t think video on a blog is the deciding factor here.
In fact, to play devils advocate, and get me hated even more than I am at the moment, I’d even go so far as to say the genre could indeed possibly be retrospective.
Horror was defined as a genre at some point, and thus retrospectively covers what came before the definition.
In much the same way, soon all our old videos will be automatically connected to the network, or have the capability to be, so why not? And perhaps we can refer to offline media as videoblogs as well, so long as they “look” like the videoblog genre.
The thing that everyone still seems to be stuck on, is this notion that a videoblog must be on “a blog” with a feed and chronology. Paaahhh. Why must it?
my original notion was:
videoblogs = art = anything you want it to be
to define seems to hinder, which results in labeling, categorization and ultimately segregation which opposes the basis of the videoblogging community.
*side note - I’m so fuckin hungry for REAL tacos!
-taxiplasm
Vlogvertising for Taco Heaven.
That’s one of the things I see.
you unlocked it’s true potential by posting it to your blog, it was always waiting for it’s moment to shine. now here it is.
This tells me two things:
1. I’m in the mood for Nachos. I blame your videowhateveritis.
2. This debate makes baby Jesus cry, and you don’t want to see baby Jesus cry, do you? DO YOU?!?
I mean, I’m Jewish, and even I don’t want to see that.