You call this new media?!

So here I am, swimming though piles of high def footage trying to assemble another video blog. The rule of thumb they taught us at film school was 8 hours of shooting will net you 5 minutes of usable footage after it is all said and done. Thankfully the blog’s shooting ratio is a bit more forgiving, but still it takes me a big hunk of time to assemble something that I think is worth watching. As it sits right now, it takes me about 3 weeks to conceive, write, shoot, edit, and post a video blog. Now if I were not also running a large and successful rope company full time, co-staring in my partner’s podcast and trying to keep a fairly entertaining written blog too they would take less time, but as my grandmother used to say “If frogs had wings they would not drag their asses on lily pads either”… I never really understood what she meant by that, but anyway I digress.

As I import footage and cull out the dull bits on afternoon, my darling Tambo shares with me her latest youtube find. “My brother showed it to me, it is all the rage and getting mad traffic”, She tells me. Now I’m all about stealing, err I mean taking inspiration, from another so I take a view in hopes of gleaning some ideas on how to improve my own product. Here is what I saw; the clip opens with a close-up of a young Asian girl, maybe 17 or 18, very pretty with high cheek bones and unnaturally large, almond eyes. Sitting alone in what must be her bedroom, all we see is her neck and face framed for the camera. She silently stares at you, tilts her head now and again and blinks for about 45 seconds.

And the clip ends.

*blink* *blink*

The truly fucked up part, when we watched it the clip had already been downloaded 2.7 MILLION times. 2.7 Million and the bitch is not even topless? There is something seriously wrong with the universe when I’m practically crapping myself with glee as our “how to” clips break the 100K download mark and stunned that 9 thousand people watched a clip of me rigging, but damn 2.7 million for somebody staring mutely at the screen like some kind of defective android? Wow. The part that really chaps my hide, the bit that makes me weep for the future of humanity? She has dozens of clips like this. Each one, just her face staring vacuously into the unblinking eye of the camera and millions flock to her so they can watch her in rapt attention as she does something dramatic like, wait for it, drink from a soda can. I kid you not; I think I felt part of my brain commit seppaku after watching that particular bit of cinematic wonder.

Ya know, maybe I’m just putting the bar too high for myself. All this writing and editing and attempting to be entertaining. Perhaps for the next video blog I’ll just shave my pubes, take a sharpie marker and draw a set of big floppy ears and the glue some googly eyes on my crotch and film “The Mr. Elephant Show” and wave my flaccid cock at the screen for a good 40 seconds.

Nah, I think that one has been done already.