Interim note 4: time-based media
Incomplete thoughts. Don’t count on any of it making sense.
Digital has made the boundaries between various different kinds of time-base media – the different formats of audio and video – much softer.
Podcasts are recorded with video. Video essays are distributed as podcasts. Series that are made for domestic broadcast in one country end up on YouTube or as a podcast globally. All of it gets cut up into bite-sized chunks for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and similar short-form platforms.
People fixate on YouTube or short-form platforms, but podcasts, broadcast, regional streaming platforms, and festivals all still exist and continue to have substantial audiences. Maybe not the huge numbers they used to, but that decline is largely meaningless when you’re starting from zero.
Even the basic economics of BluRay disc replication are still pretty good – better than printed books in many ways. There’s much less distribution, though, and that’s where the difficulty lies. DVDs and CDs always had great margins. You don’t need amazing numbers or full retail distribution for it to make decent money, but you do need to have made something people want to own, which immediately rules out 99% of video and almost all of YouTube (with notable exceptions, naturally).
Interview series benefit a lot from more fluid boundaries between formats.
A one-on-one podcast interview that’s recorded also on video lends itself to being edited into a podcast, full interview on YouTube, and question-answer quotes on short form video platforms in ways that video essays or documentaries generally don’t. People even buy interview collections as books.
Most interview series – podcast or video – tend to be unambitious, though. Not in terms of production quality. Expensive microphones and cameras abound.
But they’re unambitious in terms of craft and structure.
Most of them are structured around a topic or structure, not story, and it’s the story that gets and keeps the audience. That’s what it means to live in an age dominated by the epistemology of showmanship.
Let’s imagine a typical interview on a photography YouTube channel or podcast. Substitute “photography” with whatever topic it is you follow on these platforms. Anybody with even the slightest familiarity with the subject at hand will already know exactly what the interview will be like and how it goes.
- Start off with a rambling introduction. Most of it will be incoherent because people aren’t used to providing engaging introductions to themselves.
- Incredibly vague talk about how they deal with some task.
- Some talk about whatever project or product the subject has been working on.
- Too much time spent getting into the weeds of a narrowly defined problem the subject loves to talk about.
- If you’re really unlucky the interviewer and the subject know each other well and you end up listening to what’s effectively a café conversation filled with inside jokes and references to events and conversations they’ve had in the past.
- It’ll be much too long.
- It won’t end on anything resembling a point.
- Many of them are just somebody going through a checklist of topics that the subject is an expert in, with no concern for keeping the audience’s engaged or driving them to a meaningful conclusion.
- It’ll be punctuated with indecipherable info-dumps.
It’s hard to blame the modern podcaster. Interviewing is a dying art, even in broadcast. But it doesn’t have to be. It just requires awareness and practice.
The first is that an interview in this context is a story is not a historical record that must be preserved unaltered but a story and all stories need editing. All stories have structure. They don’t all have the same structure but they all have some structure.
The second is that the interviewer needs to have some idea of what stories they might be able to get from the subject. That means you need to know their history and you need to have already thought of a list of potential questions that might build up to an overall story. A specific interview format can help focus the questions and answers. That’s one of the reasons why “desert island discs”/time capsule shows have been so popular.
The third is that the subject is the storyteller, you are there to help keep them on track by asking the right questions. The questions are there to prompt the story and help the interview develop some sort of narrative structure. The interviewer is not the main character.
Interviewing is a craft.
Comedy also does well in this world. It doesn’t matter if it’s sketch comedy or an unscripted show, you only need the set up and punchline for a clip to work. Writing comedy, however, is bloody hard work.
Video essays, a modern derivation of the “talking head with video clips” format and what many would think of as the “YouTube native” format are much less flexible. Because the point of an essay is to build an argument of some sort, they don’t lend themselves well to short form fragmentation. Because they either rely on editing together clips with voice over in some way or on outright documentary-style scenes, they don’t convert well into podcast form.
It’s not a surprise that many YouTube video essayists have been struggling. Their format:
- Is usually too visual to be easily reformatted for the podcast audience. A book version would be even more work.
- Doesn’t have the production values or structure to qualify as documentaries for local broadcast, regional streamer, or even the festival circuit.
- Can’t be easily atomised to reach larger audiences on short-form platforms.
With high enough production values, you’re probably better off thinking of the project as a full documentary instead of a video essay and attempt to get it into some of the documentary markets. It might still end up on YouTube, but a couple of regional broadcasts or streamers can help pay for much of the production costs.
Documentaries are also more likely to have access to various film funds.
It won’t make you rich, but it can pay for the work involved.
If you don’t have the resources to increase your production values, it’s worth thinking about what a “fluid” video essay would look like. It would have to be structured to translate easily into a podcast. It would need to be punctuated with “TikTokable” scenes that both build the narrative and work as stand-alone clips. It would need additional forms of revenue that isn’t just “YouTube ads”. I have no idea how well it would work for selling ebooks, for example, as most YouTubers either tend to be very focused on video or have a platform large enough to attract mainstream trade publishers.
Screencasts, screencasts intercut with talking head shots, or even the fancy screencast with a talking head floating over it, are popular for education and training.
I genuinely hate them as a viewer. Few things lose my interest faster than a screen recording of somebody doing a task.
Occasionally it’s necessary, for example to help guide you through a particularly incoherent user interface, but it’s rarely fun.
Videos on programming and software development are almost exclusively screencasts.
There aren’t that many good options for delivering this kind of information through video, so if that’s your preferred format as a student, you’re honestly kind of screwed.
I have no idea if there’s a better way to do this. There’s a lot of money riding on this, or at least there was before tech cos began to gut both their recruitment and training efforts, so there have been quite a few attempts but I’m not sure any of it is better than just a plain screencast or even a literal slideshow of code with a voiceover.
Feels like there has to be a better way to do with.
But, then again, you could say the same about pretty much everything in tech and software development today.