Sometime pretty early in 2022, I got hooked on long Youtube video essays. Especially video game ones.
I always bemoaned the fact that Youtube videos were getting longer and longer, were getting less focused and bigger scoped. I was already not quite into the 20+ minute video game overviews of people like Nitro Rad and Scott the Woz, although I sure did watch a lot of them. But I was CERTAINLY not into the multi-hour ones.
And then… Something happened. I dove one time too many into the abyss of long Youtube video essays. And suddenly I found myself watching a ton more than ever.
I’m talking like, I watched through the majority of ThorHighHeels’s entire video library (great stuff). Almost everything from hazel (I love her videos). I watched huge videos from people like I Finished a Video Game. Yeah, a lot of them were too long for their own good, but I still devoured them like crazy.
The key to it? Multitasking, and speed. They were great to watch, at 1.75x speed, while playing a game or doing emails or cooking. Videos rarely got SO good that they were completely distracting, although I appreciated when they did.
And then the Youtube algorithm knew it captured me for good. Long Youtube video essays filled my feed, and burned my productivity bigtime. (Although I’m sure something else’da gotten me anyway.)
I have to actively avoid Youtube now in a lot of times, because there’s too many videos to watch and too much time. Even at 1.75x speed, an hour-long video’s still gonna be like 35 minutes long! Long Youtube video essays are directly responsible for my decline in watching TV and movies in 2022, as well. Even my podcast listening kinda declined this year, and I’m huge on podcasts.
But, my slow realization with all these is… I wish I could make long Youtube video essays, too. I mean, look at my blog! I love rambling about random-ass topics for more words than they’re worth. (This very blog is, unfortunately, a meta example of this.) But words don’t always do things justice. There’s so many blog posts I’ve written where I look back and go, damn, if only this had been a video. Big Dumbass Movies is a big example, as well as Why Can’t I Marry Petra?!, Death Waltz, and Really Striking Romance Covers. As of this writing, these articles have a combined 190 views, but decently produced videos of them would likely have many thousands.
Text-only blogs just don’t work the same way as video essays, and I yearn to have the creative expressive freedom of a visual and audio medium to tell this kind of stuff. I yearn to make long Youtube video essays of my own.
I need to become a fricking video editor or something.
But… It would take a really long time to gain the skills I need to actually pull it off competently. So I’m gonna keep doing my best thing and writing with my trusty mechanical keyboard.
having read through some of your blog; i really think it couldn’t work to see about writing up a script for these in some form. you have a very interesting writing style, and i could only imagine how fun and interesting your vids would come out to be.
Thanks for the comment! I do know someone who’s got experience with video editing. If I can just get some sort of mediocre audio setup going after I (sadly) move to a new place very soon, maybe there’s an opportunity to test out a couple videos. I have a lot, lot, lot of WIP articles for this blog with research or planning but not yet written, so there’s a lot of material to take from.