When I said she had been posting her video blog for about a year, it wasn't always under the blogger title she is running with. The oldest videos seem to be dealing with waking up in the morning and walking her dog.
Her first three videos posted on this youtube site were basic images and music, she did not appear as a character.
The fourth appears to be another mostly silent film with captions about her making a certain korean food for the first time and another about tacos.
She speaks in a film about her hometown, but it's not the same as when she launches herself into the videos at a character, which seems to have occurred when she started video blogging about her horse riding.
Rather than go all the way back in time, I picked one of her more recent posts from a month ago intrigued me. This involved her cutting up of a watermelon.
She apparently had a 25 percent discount, and an opposite account to the mismeasurement of Spinal Tap, she would up with a monster of a watermelon, she decided to cut up for video, launching her career as a video blogger with the sound of crashing pots and pans as she leaps into the video frame.
Although lacking the structure of her later efforts and the use of shots is far less complex than in her later videos, this early piece shows that she has studied on some level the use of camera and editing, and she has clearly established herself as a character – a very likeable, if somewhat comic figure we will see her modify later.
This character is hugely important for the future of this series. If she can get the audience to like her from the start, her videos will become more popular as she takes on more complicated adventures.
There are two basic schools of filmmaking (something of simplification, but accurate to some degree), the establishing shot/anticipation school and school of montage.
The first is usually used for story telling kinds of videos, while the second tends to be more image based.
In this first video, she leans towards the second school, and gives us a number of rapid cuts (literally in regard to her cutting up the watermelon) that create a kind of symbolic montage and offers a progression of a single action. She uses very few long takes – a single action take that tends to take time to unfold. from the glimpse I’ve had of her more recent videos, she does use long shots for action. Short takes allow long actions to be squeezed into a short time and with video blogs, you need to do everything in as short a time frame as possible.
She gives us rapid, short clips that allow the action of cutting up the watermelon to transpire in a relatively short time.
Her comic character, of course, has something of a sinister look when she shows off the large knife she will be using for the operation.
Early on in this caper, she suggests that she ought to have become a surgeon, something she might have taken back later in the episode when she accidently cuts her fingers.
“Nobody deserves to be cut by a knife,” she declares.
The process of cutting down the large fruit and removing it from its skin is done in rapid shots with her commenting the whole time, even when only her hands, the knife and the metal bowls she is filling are on the screen.
At one point, she complains about the smell of garlic, noting later that she had performed this surgery on a cutting board already tainted with the remnants of garlic.
This first video (if it is indeed the first) sets up expectations for future videos, in which the main character is expected to be a bit whacky, if also knowledgeable, and the video is entertaining despite its limited scope. I’m sure we’ll see a broader range of subjects (from what I’ve seen in glimpse of others) that will allow her to expand on her video and story-telling skills.
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