Short And "sweet": Web Video Forms And Functions

Short and “Sweet”: Web Video Forms and Functions NMC Online Conference, March 2007 Michael Z. Newman ([email protected]) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Introduction This poster considers the forms of web videos—their length, their use of audio-visual technique, and their mode of address and reception—in relation to the contexts of their production and consumption. We can call my approach a poetics of web video. Poetics (from the Greek for “creating”) is concerned with how artifacts are made. In particular I am interested in how web videos are made in response to specific constraints and to fulfill particular functions. Thinking about creation in relation to constraints and functions positions texts in a context of making and using rather than abstracting them as objects for interpretation. Thus my basic question for web videos is: In response to what forces (to adapt to which constraints, to address which functions) have their formal characteristics been fashioned? Forms Many typical web videos share some common conventions. Most apparently, videos made for the web tend to be short. Even when users upload favorite TV or movie moments, they typically excerpt only a few choice minutes. When videobloggers create a new installment, they typically work in a format that rarely exceeds five minutes. Like blogs and many other fixtures of the contemporary web, videos offer brief nuggets rather than extended discourses. Web videos are also eager to please, to appeal to viewers and engage their attention right away. This is what I like best about these videos (the good ones, anyway): they capture my attention, make me go Wow, and then they’re over. They dispense with elaborate intros and outros and use every second of their running time to make an impression. Hence my title: web videos are “sweet,” in the slang sense. Videos produced for the web have an amateur aesthetic. They look like do-it-yourself projects, not like corporate mass media. The sound is noisy, the lighting is over- or under-exposing the subject, the cutting is jumpy, the performances are made of real people goofing, not professionals playing a role. Even lonelygirl15, a pro web video, adopted an amateur aesthetic to pass itself off as authentic. Authenticity trumps polish. Finally, web videos are produced not just by individuals but by communities, and their forms betray this collaborative and participatory genesis. Videos answer other videos. YouTube allows videos to be marked as responses to other videos. They quote each

2 other. Rocketboom, a hugely successful videoblog, often inserts other people’s clips into its own daily show. These texts can take the form of a conversation between creators and consumer. The Show With Ze Frank, bills itself just this way and incorporates video clips shot by viewers among many participatory components. To summarize, then, web videos are characteristically short, “sweet,” amateur, and collaborative. Constraints One way of thinking about form is as a product of constraints. We like to think of creativity as ideally unconstrained, but in reality every act of production is limited by what tools are available to the creator. So in the production of web video, you can only do what your camera, microphone, computer, hosting service, budget, skill, and imagination will permit. Some of the forms of web video are clearly products of meager economic and technological resources. Videos on the web are typically shot with consumer-grade equipment. They are produced by passionate hobbyists or eager youngsters aspiring to a career in media. In either case, the means of production are those of the do-ityourselfer, not the professional. Even the parodic sci-fi video series Galacticast, which uses impressive digital effects like green screens, reveals its modesty by using the same BF/GF dyad as performers in every episode. And although there is some potential for earning revenue by offering video online, most web videos would seem to have a production budget of approximately zero dollars. Time is another limiting factor. Most people who make video for the web also have other things to do, like school and jobs. One significant technological constraint is the scarcity of computer memory and bandwidth. Our machines do not yet make it as easy to share long pieces as short ones. YouTube restricts length to ten minutes (though there are some videos there that are longer). But even without these technological and economic limitations, there is another reason why web videos would tend to be short. This is the social constraint of the consumer’s scarcity of time and attention. When we watch videos online we are typically doing more than one thing. We have our computers on to work or study, and in addition to video we might also be paying attention to a word processor or spreadsheet, an e-mail or IM account, an RSS reader or MySpace page. Short and “sweet” fits our patterns of computer use. It can be tempting to bemoan our constraints, but clever and talented media producers work within them, make them into opportunities, and create work that best exploits available materials and conditions.

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Affordances Media producers are motivated by a desire to fulfill specific functions. Web videos function as brief diversions, “snacks” as opposed to the meals offered by movies and TV. We experience these videos in the context of a wider experience of computer use, another reason for their brevity and their sweetness. We can think of functions as affordances, as the creation of potential for use. Web videos afford us these momentary diversions, but they also exploit the affordances of their delivery system, the internet. In particular, the internet is good at connecting users. It is, after all, a network. Unlike TV and movies, which travel from a small number of producers to a vast public of consumers, the internet allows both sending and receiving among all those connected to it. Like other social networking on the web, video can take advantage of the internet’s architecture of participation. A good example of a video site that does this is The Show with Ze Frank.

The Show is a daily video series that ran from March, 2006 to March, 2007. It was the work of a solitary artist from Brooklyn, Ze Frank, who performed, shot, and edited it himself, and also wrote, performed, and recorded original music for many episodes. Frank inspired an impressive following of fans, dubbed Sports Racers, who became his collaborators in various ways on The Show. Sports Racers would take part in contests and initiate projects like the “earth sandwich” made by placing two pieces of bread on exactly opposite ends of the globe. They collaborated against him in chess; they plotted their moves in their forum and he gave his during the show. At one point, the upper echelon of Sports Racers, known as the Fabulosos, scripted an entire episode collaboratively on a wiki and Frank performed it to the letter and in its entirety. Sports Racers collaborated on songs and music videos, and uploaded video introductions starring themselves to begin each episode, which Frank integrated into the vlog. In essence, The Show is a social network. It is an audio-visual expression that makes use of the web’s affordance of bringing people together. The form of the program, Frank says, is a conversation between the host and the viewers. Frank champions the amateur media maker seizing control of the tools of expression and fashioning a new participatory aesthetic. This can be seen in the episode of July 14, 2006, in which Frank introduced contestants in an “Ugly MySpace Contest” and defended his use of the word “ugly” to signify a new conception of amateur design aesthetics for the web 2.0 age. This clip is a good illustration of all of my points. It is short and “sweet,” and has an amateur look and feel with its rough editing and bland mise en scène. It is also participatory insofar as it initiates a contest for viewers to take part in and also spends most of its time with Ze answering a viewer’s question, a regular feature called “S-s-ssomething from the comments.”

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Conclusion Web videos like The Show have their own distinct formal traits. Considering these in relation to the constraints and affordances of internet culture reveals much about how web videos come into being and about how they are typically used.