Video Observation

For our Video Observation homework assignment, we were asked to spend one day “pay[ing] special attention to the video” we “see on television, computer, phone, and movie screens.” I do not have television, so on the day of my observations I took the excuse to watch a lot of media online. I watched some of the videos embedded in news article pages, a few episodes of a BBC expedition documentary/nature show on Netflix, and also spent some time on YouTube watching a sample of the front page recommendations. 

                I found that the shorter videos, such as commercials and those on news websites and YouTube, were usually fast paced and attention grabbing. The footage was cut and put together very tightly, so that there was very little excess time between the points of most interest. Videos with informative content were primarily shots of a person facing and speaking to the camera, peppered with illustrative photographs or animations. It seemed that the content of most of the videos was constructed to satisfy the viewers’ curiosity about something, whether about the subject matter or a tempting title. Some video could be rough, or shaky, or poorly angled or lit. Songs and sound effects had been added over some of the video, especially in commercials. 

I found that the footage I watched was generally very human-centric, having been taken at a human height, from a human perspective, in order to document something that a person was doing or experiencing. In the nature documentary, some footage was taken high up in trees or low on the forest floor, but still from the perspective of the people who had reached those places at the time, as opposed to footage taken by a drone with a camera, for example. If I closed my eyes and just listened, there was always the sound of humans talking or narrating. Any other sounds were typically much quieter than the sounds of the voices. Footage in commercials was typically of an actor or actress speaking. The majority of people visible in the video I watched were white, especially in the leading roles. Visually, male and female hosts seemed to be evenly portrayed in videos, while the majority of hosts in commercials seemed to be female, although there wasn’t any discussion of gender in that day’s sample of videos. Interestingly, almost every person in the various footage I saw was in the age range of maybe about 25 – 60, except for a few children in the background of the BBC documentary.

The more professional the context of the footage, the more it generally had bright colors and entertaining camera angles. I think that I should have watched some fictional shows on the day of my observations, because I remember a lot of interesting perspectives in TV shows like Breaking Bad. I think that the short, non-fiction videos I watched on the internet were all fairly similar to one another.