November 10, 2015

from my perspective & your perspective, narratives from youtube point of views

When a story is narrated it proceeds as per mandates set by its narrator telling it. What if one could see it from different perspectives, all at the same time told by the people who are participating in, or well the story as an event. It could be as a content group leading up to a similar narrative but told from different perspectives of actors participating as individuals to the tale. Not often this act is possible or even anticipated. With the rise of vlogging on YouTube these kinds of explorations, mostly as ideas on storytelling pop up as ubiquitous exercises. This is an early stage find of sorts. Early, since a) vlogging is just becoming a thing and b) the videos too are drawn from early stage of the accounts before the million mark subscriber benchmark. Collected from content generated between 2014 — ’15 the set follows a group of creators (Casey Neistat, FunForLouis, Mr Ben Brown) at various points they decide to get together. Because meeting (with the specific reason to make a vlog) is yet to be a thing at the point of recording each from the group just goes about doing his/ her own style of content creation, edits and thus publishing. Essentially they are unintentional in occurrence or can be seen as such. This disjunct is what they as a group makes their observations interesting to connect. Largely parallel storytelling is left as unscripted, not stated as such. With popularity, dynamics of how one reacts or sees these narratives change. This change is when the meet-up produces different material. What is lost is the duality of a random act, multiplicity of arriving at a destination and the distinction via which it’s consumed.