i think it’s pretty wild that you can pick up a camera, do some recording, and edit it together into a film.
for sure, it helps if you have a decent camera. you get the biggest impact from a better microphone though. sound is very important, more important than what you see. but even so, it really doesn’t matter if you have low production value. it’s okay if it sounds and looks bad, it’s okay if you can’t hear what people are saying, it’s okay if it’s all shaky and crunchy
i think you can “own” low production value, make things feel a bit guerilla. there is no wrong way to make a film. i’ve used all sorts of tools for all sorts of things they’re not intended for, like people ask me sometimes what i used for the motion graphics in this video and i think they were expecting some fancy tool or something that did it all, but the reality was i used a real hodge-podge of different tools: it’s more of a scrappy problem-solving scenario using whatever scraps you have around you.
we’re now long past the youtube era of film making: we’re now in the tiktok era, so making youtube style films is— there is now an entire huge massive body of work you can use for inspirations for youtube style films. but also, there are now established norms and expectations that you can go with or against to play with people’s expectations. what youtube is / means to me is: anyone can publish a film on the internet. this is of course a quite naive ideal. and then of course, google swooped in and bought it and turned it into yet another advert juicing machine, and the platform turned into— became dominated by people doing it cynically: trying to grab attention and get eyeballs with huge stunts and huge teams behind them, squeezing the casual creators out with tabloid-like thumbnails and a lot of money.
but the youtube dream is still there: you can still make a film and put it online, it doesn’t have to be on youtube, it can be anywhere, it’s easier than ever to put a film online. even the internet archive is a good choice! of course, you won’t get the same reach that youtube gives you, but that doesn’t matter! share it with your friends and your community: deliver a fully formed film to their doorstep. i think film making is an excellent way to communicate and show things and tell stories, much better than discord or mastodon or bluesky messages or dry blog posts.
i think some people think of internet films as a “low” artform. they’re cynical of it, i think. they see it only as— they lump it together with the people squeezing out eyeballs from youtube itself. and yes, there is a way to do it cynically, i think. but film making itself is, i think, a beautiful medium, despite, or maybe because, of it being “low art”.
there are certain genres of film that only came into existence because of youtube: the internet tutorial, the vlog, the devlog, the video review, the unboxing, the asmr video, the talking head, the video essay. these did not exist before youtube, even if they had similar parallel genres, the youtube versions gained their own life. all of these formats now exist, there are bazillions of films made in their style, and yet still they are largely unexplored, the formats are so young / we are so early still in the history of the internet film.
just as this is happening, the world has already moved on: vertical short form is here as the dominant artform, leaving the wide-screen internet film as the uncool left-behind [—]
from the perspective of both the past and the future, the wide-screen internet film is mostly looked down upon. it doesn’t have the prestige of real cinema or television. it doesn’t have the relevancy or impact of short-form. in my opinion, this means that the wide-screen internet film is deeply [—]. nobody expects much of it. this means it’s an open goal for you every time you make one. no one expects anything that good so you can go out and surprise them.
but, unlike shorts, wide-screen internet films are very linked to genre. you start watching one and you think to yourself, “oh this is a vlog” or “oh this is a tutorial” or “oh this is a video essay” or whatever. that means your audience has— although the audience has low expectations of [—] they have strong expectations of format, so you can mix and match them (their expectations) as an artistic device. there’s something really appealing about an— as an internet film maker, you’re very reachable to your audience. it’s not like the cinema. the crowd can write a comment to you before, during or after their viewing. a relationship is formed between them and you much more strongly than traditional film.
this closeness combined with strong genre expectations…… it means you can really tell a story by playing with the [—].
there’s something about— when you watch a tutorial made by someone, recorded in their home, you might learn about the thing they’re trying to teach you. you might also learn a bit about them. what situation happened in their life that prompted them to make this video? why are they doing it? are they trying to make a career out of this? or is it because of love of the subject? for the love of the game? is it a hobby? do they [—] the people around them in their life / do they neglect their friends and family to make these videos? do they have their support? is this a guilty pleasure? does it make them happy? how do they feel about it?
i used to get obsessed with channels / creators where the person had made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos but all of them had almost no views at all. and i couldn’t help but wonder… what keeps them going? there’s clearly something— do they just love it that much? are they hoping that… one day… they’ll get their big break: they’ll go viral and it’ll all have been worth it?
internet films feel voyeuristic to me. you get to peer into someone’s life / bedroom / habits - something that was previously— you couldn’t do this before youtube. love it or hate it, the world opened up with youtube, for better and worse, at least for a little bit, until it all returned to corpo-eyeball-sludge, for the most part.
i think you should make films and put them on the internet. i don’t think you should wait for someone else to do it for you / make a film about you or your story. it’ll either never happen or they’ll do it wrong. tell your story… show us your life… make a film.
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