The article below is from the Video Ideas email list.
For years the advice on internet video has been: make it short.
Well, today we’re saying screw that.
Titanic sinks in REAL TIME – 2 hour 40 min video of the Titanic sinking
Normally documentaries — indeed, stories in general — compress time to make things more interesting and intelligible. So there’s something arresting about when a video does the opposite and plays events out in real-time, like in this animation tracing the sinking of the Titanic. I think it unlikely many viewers watch the whole video — I presume they hop around to witness particular moments (e.g. when the electricity cuts and the ship breaks in two at 2:39) so in a way, this is more a type of interactive film than long-form.
I’ve seen a few other historical projects take this approach, but my favourite example is The Great War YouTube channel, which has made a whole series recreating World War 1 from start to finish, each weekly episode covering the events of 100 years earlier.
2020 Election countdown counter | Buzzfeed
The day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Buzzfeed published this live countdown clock. The video quickly went viral gaining over 50m views within a week. Considering how cheap this was to make, that’s a pretty amazing result!
In truth, the video only runs for 3 hrs and 35 mins and then just repeats, but there is an 8 hour limit on live broadcasts on Facebook.
The other example I’ve seen of this approach is this video of a plastic bottle decomposing in real-time, making the point it actually takes 450 years. The page is titled “Longest Live Streaming Ever”.
Tokyo Walk – Beautiful Evening Walk in Kagurazaka | Tokyo Explorer – Long unedited walking tour through Tokyo
Last year, my wife and I were visiting her parents when I noticed that my mother-in-law was watching hours of long, unedited walks through Saigon — the city she used to live in. The footage wasn’t particularly well shot and it was really long, with nothing but a bit of chatter over the top. I couldn’t quite see the appeal until some months later I found myself watching a similarly long video walking through a suburb of Tokyo, this time a city I used to live in. It was an enchanting experience — slow and relaxing, a bit like an evening walk.
While on this topic I must also mention the Night Walks series, which ran on repeat overnight between 1986-1993 on a Canadian television channel, as an alternative to a test card. Each episode is a first-person walk through nighttime Toronto with jazz music playing throughout. The music is pretty bad —apparently, the idea came from a company executive who also insisting on writing the music — but it’s hypnotic, and a fascinating bit of television history. You can watch the 80s episodes (plus some updates) on the Nightwalks YouTube channel.
Have you been flying BLAH Airlines? | Virgin Amercia ⭐ A fictional recreation of a six hour flight from hell – an advert for Virgin Airlines
The original description for this video read: “Take a look inside BLAH Airlines Flight 101 from Newark to San Francisco. Witness the harsh reality of nearly six hours of flying at its worst, from takeoff to landing.” This simple idea is brilliantly executed: I love the lifeless manakins and the soundtrack is full of babies crying and inane chatter from other passengers. (Don’t miss the surreal dream sequence interrupted by the cabin crew offering a blanket.)
Bergensbanen: minutt for minutt | NRK ⭐View from the front of a train travelling across Norway (clip of original)
The first I heard of “slow TV” was when Norwegian television was broadcasting long train journeys, such as this seven-hour long journey through the snows from Bergen to Oslo. Since then others have tried it, for example, in 2015 BBC Four released a series of programmes including a three-hour walk around the National Gallery and a two-hour ride on a country bus.
This genre is well-suited to online. These days you can watch footage of earth from the International Space Station, eight hours of a tropical beach, or even 10 hours of an eagle flying. Most of these videos are just on repeat, so lack the purity of slow TV, but it’s interesting to see this genre flourish. Its offer of background relaxation makes it more like radio than television. In fact, I’ve started playing a train journey on my second monitor as I work, sometimes accompanied by “U Smile” by Justin Beiber slowed down 800% (another experiment in “long”).
By the way, the background to Slow TV is fascinating. I enjoyed this New Yorker article tracing its history back to Andy Warhol who made a five hour film of his boyfriend sleeping:
“It premièred at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, in 1964, before an audience of nine people. Two walked out. Later that year, the experimental poet Ron Padgett published a sonnet responding to the film. A representative passage:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”
Nick Offerman’s ‘Yule Log’ | advert for Lagavulin Single Malt Scotch 45mins of Nick Offerman sitting next to a log fire occasionally sipping whisky
The Yule Log was a programme that was broadcast every Christmas between 1966 to 1989 on a New York television station, consisting of nothing but a film loop of a fireplace. As a Brit I didn’t realise this advert was a tribute to this show, yet I still admired it. After all, if the whisky you’re selling is meant to be about relaxation and slowing down then what better way to emphasise that message? But then adding Nick Offerman – a comic actor – and the fact he’s doing nothing but just looking at your, brings a kind of tension to the whole thing. I keep waiting for the punchline.
Incidentally, YouTube is full of fireplace videos. In fact there’s one YouTube channel called “Fireplace10hours” which features nothing but one video — a video of a fireplace — that’s had 27m views.
A ⭐means particularly recommended. While all the films I include in these emails are worth knowing about for some reason, these are the ones you definitely don’t want to miss watching.