Youtube and chill in Book Two

There is a boomer couple who have been traveling and making videos for a few years. They sometimes pop up in my feed when they are in China or Taiwan. I can’t stand to watch them. Their videos are 80% b-roll so what you get is a short sentence or two followed by a minute and a half of shots or her walking, him walking, panorama, cinematic, close up, long shot, low angle shot, tracking shot… it’s like they have a checklist. And the music they use? Don’t get me started.

And they don’t know anything. They pronounce all the places incorrectly. They make assumptions. They read the plaques and then tell their viewing audience what they just read. But they have no idea in the scope of history why it’s important what they just ‘learned’. They used simplified script for their captions in Taiwan. A guy I know bumped into them in a night market in Taiwan two years ago and they were as hopeless in person as they are in video.

That is old school video making done poorly.

There is also a trend, or at least a few guys doing it. Just walking and talking to the camera. No music. No b-roll. Usually pretty short and to the point. They are more like the videos that I make. Simple. Little or no editing. I hope it continues.

I was listening to a podcast last night that was talking about how popular Youtube is to watch on TV. It is in the same ballpark as Netflix. The streaming services used to think of it like gaming - something that people did on their TVs when they weren’t streaming. But now it is seen as another streaming competitor.