Author Archives: gschroeter

Variety Playlist – Griffin Schroeter

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I use YouTube for a variety of different styles and genres of videos. Seriously, there were almost more videos that represented my interests on YouTube than I could fit on the playlist. My favorite videos on YouTube, generally, are ones that have to do with analysis of games and films. The channel Extra Credits is probably the one that I follow the most religiously – their main video series exploring video games and why they mater is released weekly on wednesdays, making for an easy schedule to keep up with. Many of the channels I follow most closely are ones that analyze media – whether it be games, movies, or television series. I find this sort of content fascinating, because it teaches me to always look at pieces of media from many angles to try to find what is most important or worth talking about. Keeping up with these channels has expanded greatly my ability to pick apart games, especially, and understand their mechanics at a depth that was unknown to me before YouTube.

Another channel I enjoy that analyzes films is YourMovieSucksDotOrg, wherein Adam digs deep into his experience watching thousands of films through his life and talks about what works and what doesn’t in modern films – but mostly what doesn’t work, hence the channel name. While I don’t enjoy negative or overly critical explorations of media (such as the channel CinemaSins and their series “Everything wrong with (this movie)” ) YMS has enough of a spread of criticism (usually carried out in a comedic way, which helps) and surprising insights that it feels actually quite balanced by the end of each video. He may be critical of these films, especially ones that are awful, but he never just sits there and yells at them for being stupid, which is refreshing in a community of critics that take their title too literally.

Other videos I watch, that don’t have to do with analysis, range wildly. I enjoy a reddit trend called “YouTube Haiku”, whereby people will post videos of a “poetic nature” that are under 30 seconds. There’s something about these videos that defy expectation and convention that is really enjoyable, if a bit ridiculous. It’s really hard to explain what “poetic nature” really means – in fact, even the subreddit itself doesn’t seem to have a structured definition. Often these videos have a comedic angle as well.

Vines – The Forefront of Comedic Narrative Exploration

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Vines are 6 second long videos that do to YouTube’s formula what Twitter did to Facebook’s: repackage it smaller and allow for a vastly increased amount of accessibility for creation. Like Twitter’s 140 character limit, the 6 second time limit creates a restriction that promotes a community that uses their time as efficiently and smartly as possible. Instead of truly being a limiting force, this 6 second limit encourages Vine’s millions of users to do unique and intelligent things with the brief span of time that they do have, especially if one is trying to produce original content.

This limiting force is not a perfect blessing for creativity, though. There is a sizable community on Vine of users who create and recycle a distinct style of memes, en masse, with effort only in transforming the meme just enough that is received as a unique iteration. I am not saying these memes videos are undesirable or detestable by any means, but rather that the air of creativity that the limiting factor has on those making original content for Vine has an equally sizable side effect for those users who are not trying to produce original content – the format, and the fact that Vines can be shot and edited from a phone mean that it is unbelievably simple to hop on the meme-train on Vine, especially considering the memes on Vine consist mostly of soundbites or their video equivalent, timing in at one half to 3 seconds. This means that the remainder of time is even more severely limited, and can really only be used to set up a joke, with whatever meme is to be used as the punchline. This diminishes the total creativity in the system by simplifying the process by which a Vine can achieve popularity.

Vine represents, to me, the trend for digital items to be made as digestible as possible. In some ways, Vines are even more package-able than animated gifs – a gif can be more than 6 seconds, for instance – and the fact that sound is included asks the question of the creators: how much content can you shove into this tiny box? Depending on the creator, the answer ranges, but it isn’t hard to find impressive displays of organization and comedic timing if you look enough.