Reality vs perception in video creation

Hey friends, how are you? It's Wednesday. I guess I'd say it's, yeah, it's Wednesday evening. It's almost 8 p.m. I forgot to do this morning's. My wife says, are you doing devotionals? Are you sharing devotionals into your phone, into AI? I said, no way. I'm creating art. At least that's what I like to call it. Anyway, I missed this morning's planning session, so I can't talk about that, but I can talk about something that happened after work today.

So, I, again, we're not supposed to embrace the term content creator. It feels a little cringy and it feels like we're only creating content for the sake of having it consumed, maybe? I'm not sure. But that is, if you create podcasts and blogs and YouTube videos and things like whatever this is, then I suppose that's content creation. One of the things I create is a series of van life videos. I won't get into that too deep, but van life is essentially people who live in their van full-time or not. I fall under the category of or not. You can go in a van part-time, you can go in a van on a weekend. It turns out there's no officially sanctioned thing that says what van life is and no one can tell you what you can and can't tell or can't call van life video, so. I enjoy doing some camping in my van and I enjoy making videos about it and that's all there is to it. You can find that stuff on YouTube under the name Big Rob's Van, which is all one word, or you can go to BigRobsVan.com or you can go to Instagram, BigRobsVan.com. Now I'm starting to sound like a commercial.

Anyway, I went after work today. There's a park in my town and it's called Boot Hill. In the middle of Boot Hill in this park, Oklahoma's a relatively flat place, but in the middle of this park there is a really tall hill. I suppose it's probably Boot Hill, now that I think about it. Boot Hill is probably, I don't know, two stories tall. It's not very tall. There's a sidewalk that zigzags back and forth that you can walk all the way up to the top of Boot Hill and there's a couple of park benches at the top where you can sit and look all the way around 360 degrees and see Boot Hill. It's not, you know, probably not most people's, it wouldn't be on your bucket list, but it's something to do. And I needed an interesting location to shoot a video from today. So I went to Boot Hill. I took my phone, I took my external microphone and hiked, I would say, not hiked, is it called a hike if it takes five minutes? But I spent five minutes walking to the top of Boot Hill and when I got to the top of Boot Hill I discovered, I would say, I mean I estimate somewhere between 30 and 40 mile an hour winds. I had to hang on to my hat, I had to hang on to my glasses, I had a backpack, I had to hang on to my backpack, everything was blowing around. Oklahoma is kind of a windy place and if you go up to the top of Boot Hill apparently it's even more windy. So it was a very windy day.

Now I have an external microphone and to shield it from external noises it comes with a magnet and so the easiest way to attach it is to slip the microphone inside your shirt and use the magnet to clip on the outside of your shirt which kind of makes a little microphone sandwich I suppose with the magnet and your skin being the bread and the microphone being the meat of the sandwich, that's a strange way to describe it. But I was pretty sure with 40 mile an hour sustained winds that you would not be able to hear, that you were going to get wind noise, you were not going to be able to hear what I was saying. So I covered the microphone, I cupped it with my hand, I covered it up with my hand and I stepped with my back to the wind and I thought this will solve the problem. And then I recorded a video, I stood up on top of Boot Hill and I talked for 10 minutes about all these different things about my van and future adventures and I was pretty proud of myself.

When I was all done, I packed my stuff up and I packed all my stuff into my backpack and went down to the van. And it's time to go home for dinner. And so on my way home, I clicked on one of the videos. And the video sounds like a cross between TV static turned up as loud as possible and possibly a banshee or some other type of otherworldly spirit screaming at the top of its lungs. You cannot hear a single word I'm saying. It sounds like one of those videos... It sounds like a video if you were driving 80 miles an hour down the interstate and you held your phone out the window. It's completely unusable. I don't even know if I can use the video. Because the video, you're going to see me talking and you won't be able to hear anything I'm saying. So the footage, I think, is probably ruined. It's not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I live five miles from there. I can go there tomorrow maybe when it's less windy and perhaps try to film it again.

But the point is, and this is my whole point for today, is that there were three different, I don't want to say realities, but there were three different versions of that video. There was the reality that I was standing there in the wind, you know. And then there was what I thought reality was on my phone. I thought my phone was capturing the same reality I was experiencing. And then, you know, you have this other, I don't even know how to say it, just like this, I guess the reality that was happening in my head, you know. So you've got the reality that's happening in real life. You've got whatever the phone is capturing. And then you've got whatever I'm imagining in my mind of what this is going to look like. And none of those things were the same, you know.

And sometimes I think about that. Like when I see, I mean, I'm old. I turned 50 last year, and when I go to concerts, I don't go to a lot of concerts anymore, but when I do, I find it completely amazing that people will record an entire concert with their phone. And they will watch the concert. They're there in the concert of real life, but they're not even watching the concert. They're watching their phone, which is watching the concert, you know. And I don't, do those people, this is a legit question, do those people watch those videos? Do they go home and they go, boy, you know, I saw, you know, I saw that Taylor Swift cover band, and Taylor and the Swifties, Tyler, Tyler Swift, I saw Tyler Swift perform for 60 minutes. I recorded the entire thing, and then, you know, tomorrow I'm going to watch the whole thing again, and I'm going to watch it next week, and I'm going to watch it next year. Like, maybe those people exist. I found a long time ago that most musicians, most performers, have professional recordings of their concerts, and they're way better than anything my phone could ever capture, you know.

I've tried recording things at concerts, like, you know, a little 10-second thing to post online just so people know, hey, here's where I'm at, you know. And again, you've got the reality that you're experiencing, you know. You just, the excitement, everything about this concert, you know. And then in your head, you're like, oh, I'm capturing this, and I'm zooming in, and I'm getting that. You know, this is what it's going to be like. And then the, it never sounds, it never sounds like it does, the recording never sounds like it does in real life. It never looks like it looks like in real life, you know. It's usually all pixelated because there's not enough light for the picture, or there's too much light, and everything looks washed out. If there's smoke, like a smoke machine or a fog machine, you know, it messes up the photos. So it's really hard to get those three things to line up.

So I guess that's what I would say. And that's kind of my takeaway. I don't know that I have advice on that today, but it's just something to think about is that, you know, the reality that we see on our phones or computers, when we watch YouTube videos, when we watch documentaries, or fakeumentaries or mockumentaries sometimes, you know, but whatever. Reality TV is a favorite quote of mine. And it actually comes from an old horror movie. But it's a great quote. It actually comes from, I believe it's from the sequel to The Exorcist, I think is where it comes from. When they're talking to a scientist and they're talking about reality, and he says, reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.

But yeah, I just thought it was very interesting today that while I was trying to film something, you know, and I realized that all those things were different. Like what I thought the video was gonna be and what I was experiencing in reality and then what I got on my phone were three very different things. And so, if you're watching videos on your phone or on your computer or something like that, just know that whatever that person was experiencing in reality, in some way was probably different, you know? And maybe what they thought they were capturing was different too, so. Anyway, it's time for dinner for me. So I will leave you with that one and tomorrow morning, be time to make some more coffee and have some deep, deep brewed thoughts.