This guy has so much (too much?) youtube energy. It's exhausting. Do people act like this in person, or is it solely their youtube persona? what makes this silent movie over acting level of over the top something that is such a thing on youtube?
There's an adage in producing video or being on TV that you need to act 2x "more" than your usual self to appear mildly engaging due to the limits of the medium. Some people go a bit further than that, but the idea of being far more intense and full-on than you would ever be in real life is pretty standard in modern video production. Makeup, lighting, and other factors will often be dialled up too.
I've seen plenty of shy, geeky folks who've become YouTube famous talk about the necessity to do this as they progressed. You can see it for yourself, too, if you find a successful channel and go back to the oldest videos. The energy and style of talking will ramp up over time. Quite few folks will talk, act, and look entirely as they might naturally.
I don't think that it's the energy of the acting that's jarring. I think it's the frequency of the cuts. This could be to cover up mistakes in diction (you only need to remember less than a few seconds of your lines at a time!) or just to hold the viewers attention with unnatural movements.
One example of what you describe is GreatScott, a videomaker covering DIY electronics. He has definitely developed a more intense style, but he still gets through a paragraph of his lines without a cut. He doesn't need to turn his image upside-down to be engaging.
This is actually not the case in credible acting class. No acting teacher will tell you to act like a buffoon for the sake of being engaging unless you're trying to be a children's programming buffoon. Even then, if you look at what's popular for longer than a hot minute in children's programming, the people don't act like that. The people on TV that act like that are usually trying to sell you something. People believing "over the top == good" probably grew up liking JarJar Binks.
This is more an idea around presenting than acting, but I wasn't talking about being a buffoon, as such, but using more energy to overcome the limitations of the medium and to, ironically, appear more "normal" on screen.
If you watch a lot of popular YouTubers' early vs later videos, you can see it in effect. It's common to see radical developments in elocution, projection, and energy from their natural state, and it's nearly always for the better.
If you think this doesn't make them look like a buffoon, then you are much more generous than I.
"always for the better" that's definitely a matter of opinion, and I'm not buying it. it's just another in the long list of reasons why i don't spend a lot of time watching these types of "creators"
For the record. I get like this when I'm really geeking out over something. I also know that I can be exhausting to listen to when I'm like this, and try to tone it down depending on my audience. Though, if I was a youtube personality I would probably try to lean into it slightly.
It's a youtube persona. One of the most effective ways to increase your chances of success in modern media is to be loud and emotive. It's way past trend phase and is now endemic on all platforms among content creators who hope to have any younger viewers.
My concern is that people will actually start acting this way in person every day. I've known a few people that are larger than life over the top whenever they do anything, but they luckily have been rare. These type of people would definitely make me refuse to RTO if my coworkers were like this.
Yes. Coming across whilst browsing, or being recommended, anyone that talks 'like this' (overacted, yes, overreacting too), plus is edited so frenetically, is a turn off. The talk is deliberately longer than it needs to be. Feels like being doorstepped.
> The song employs complex rhythms, changing time signatures frequently between 4/4, 3/4 and 5/4 during the opening and closing segments, around a rhythmically straightforward 4/4 middle improvisation section.
I was trying to count the beats, and it wasn't going well. That explains why.
For practically my whole life I've had this recurring memory of a 1-12 song with this exact rhythm and couldn't remember where it was from. The older I got, the more I wondered if it was manufactured purely by my imagination. I'm pretty sure this is it. Even though it was made before my time, it must have either been re-run in the 90s or some teacher might have played it off a VHS tape.
Also, gotta love how the video is 12 minutes and 12 seconds long. :)
I have a similar story. All my life the letters of the alphabet each had a color associated with it. D is green and K is blue, etc.
One day for no particular reason I decided to pay attention to which color each letter evoked in me. And to my great surprise, it was a simple-ass repeating pattern! Up until this point, I had never actually noticed it. And when I did notice it, it sparked a new mystery for me.
I knew right away that this pattern meant my color associations must have come from some toy blocks or a set of magnetic refrigerator letters. But every single time I saw these toy blocks, or magnets, they never matched the colors in my head!
Finally, about five years ago, a friend of mine out of the blue sent me this link:
The colors in that link were the same as the ones in my head, and now I knew where I formed those associations. As a toddler playing with magnets on my fridge, that must have been this particular set.
The color association is still there today, and as strong as it ever was. And it kind of helps me recall peoples’ names when I can’t think of them right away. I’ll say goofy shit like, “oh, what was his name? David? Daniel? …It’s some green name.”
Hah, I had the same experience as you a while back when my oldest was 4 or so. This rhythm and melody was like a staple of my internal, relentless sound/music generation I tend to do, but I could never remember where I got it from. Then one day this comes on and oh my god, it all came pouring back. So cool. And somehow my recollection of the tune was almost perfect; it’s insane how well we can recall music and in such detail. It must have stuck with me largely unchanged for almost 30 years.
That's amazing and I'm now wondering if it influenced the demoscene. In fact I'm specifically thinking of "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still, which has fairly similar concepts going on, especially at the end. It's also one of the best executable demos I've ever seen.
I'm actually surprised that someone paid to have the SD source clean up and uprezed to HD. Must have been a pretty clean SD source, maybe some 1" that was only used a couple of times and definitely not someone's broadcast tape.
I'm just guessing but it seems highly likely that the original production was recorded to film and not to tape. Given access to the original film would make it easy to transfer at a higher quality than the original broadcast.
This is a staple of my childhood since I'm a GenXer.
My kids never saw a second of Sesame Street, unfortunately. We didn't watch TV, only streaming, and the other options like Daniel Tiger were much easier to get access to and relatable. It's sad that I don't have that shared experience with them but I guess that's just how life is!
...And the new Sesame Street isn't the same. Older Sesame Street isn't available in the same episode format in high quality. The DVDs containing older Sesame Street have various clips.
The biggest difference I've noticed is that the newer episodes are targeted to a younger demographic, which makes it seem very dumbed-down compared to the old stuff, but it means younger kids can keep up and learn from it. My 3yo learns a ton from the recent episodes, whereas the older sesame streets are just a little too complex for her to follow. I'll try the older ones on her once she ages out of the recent ones.
Hi Bonnie, so sorry to be randomly commenting on this post, but I can't comment on one you posted in 2019 that I'm interested in (about BBS). I'm a journalist researching the topic. My email is in my bio. Thanks!
If you like this, you might also enjoy this extremely psychedelic video that is practically a homage to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaCOvylhxks (Leafcutter John - Yes Come Parade With Us)
I absolutely adored the psychedelic stylings of the pinball number count as a kid and still do. The kids tv stuff from that era even in conservative Ireland was well weird and funky. Check out the into to this mainstay of children’s tv I grew up with:
I believe this look traces back to the work of Push Pin Studios[1], an influential graphic design studio founded in the mid-sixties. It is hard to underestimate how much this style dominated the time; as a kid in the seventies these psychedelic stylized chrome reflections were everywhere.
I mostly think of it by association with artists who were well-known for it, such as the Pushpin guys, or Peter Max.
Worth looking at: the catalog from this exhibition of some of Push Pin's work. [2]
Maybe. I never got the impression Jim Henson needed psychedelics though. It was certainly in the zeitgeist of the time if you were counter culture which I think sesame street was certainly trying to be at the time.
All I needed was the title, and could immediately hear the tune in my head. This is one of those videos that I turn to as evidence on how we were being groomed to be trippy little stoner kids. Oh, and all of the Sid&Marty Krofft shows too.
I loved the ramps and movement of this video as a kid... and the mysterious and abrupt holes that apparently send the ball to one of many levels of this strange contraption/world.
I got the same feelings with Commander Mark and The Secret City, the PBS drawing show: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_City (also on YouTube, though the video quality is disappointing)
Sesame Street premiered when I was eleven years old, so I didn't ever watch any episodes. Me and my buds were outside kids and didn't have much time for TV. My children, however, loved it and I did too whenever I could watch it with them.
My grown children now all use streaming services, so their kids hardly ever see Sesame Street. How times change.
Something about that rolling marble is so satisfying. Haven't seen or even thought about this animation in decades, and yet it's completely familiar. It's amazing to think about memories just lying dormant in the brain for so long, consciously inaccessible without the proper stimulation. What other random stuff is hidden up there?
The drugs of choice changed in the 80s. In the 60s/70s, it was lots of weed and psychedelics. In the 80s, it switched to cocaine, then crack in the 90s. And as we all all know, crack is whack!
Since you're not going to watch it, I'll tell you it's about the 12 seconds left on the timer before the bomb goes off, but the Bert & Ernie buddy cop team comes in and disarms the bomb at 1 second, and the older buddy cop says "I'm too old for this" and something about only having two weeks left before his pension.
I asked pretty much the same kind of question in response to another post, and it was recognized as being very valuable.
This one was perceived differently. Based on the unusually high number of downvotes, I have some explanations that may explain them: some people have little awareness / appreciation for (some combination of):
- the importance of signal to noise ratio on HN
- YouTube, for many, is an unwelcome rabbit hole —- and so a lot of people don’t want to go there without good reason
- the value of asking “what do you get out of this” questions
I am genuinely curious about other people’s brains work. I’m also acutely interested in building better awareness and even mechanisms for collaborating and discussing.
As a musician who also works in tech, it’s a little like a post mortem of a particularly novel and elegant architectural response to a challenging use case, a bit like Carmack’s Reverse. Our expectation is that a song in 12 will sound disjoint and clunky, this one is catchy and funky. Masterful!
To phrase my question another way: why is this on-topic?
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The link shared by notamy is part of it, the musicality is phenomenally technical, but also the collaboration and creativity in the production ( the top-of-their-craft musicians and animations ).
Sesame Street changed in the early 2000’s . They started to invest in digital animation, the issue I had with it was too much energy was put into the production of the medium and not enough into the quality of the content . The last years of pbs before it went to hbo were odd , but my kids aged out of it then too . But good memories none the less .
> This song teaches counting but is INSANELY hard to count
It goes into the theory of how the song works; to me as a layperson it was fairly educational.