Video vertigo

Television news people are pretty clever. And no, I’m not referring to the yokel-type segments on Bigfoot sightings and dogs so ugly they’re cute.

 

It’s the men and women doing the graphics for those broadcasts who impress me, because they’ve somehow found a way to make viewer-submitted video somewhat watchable. Since the dimensions of these amateur clips rarely match the dimensions of a TV screen, the graphics people have started doing something subtle: filling up the unused part of the screen with either an inoffensive background graphic or a distorted, funhouse-mirror version of the video itself. This latter strategy hems in the actual clip with blurry, hallucinatory  images which provide light and movement without distracting from the central content. It’s great if you’ve been eating tabs of acid for about a month.

 

The preceding paragraph wouldn’t have made a lick of sense 10 years ago. (There’s a chance it still doesn’t; my meds are pretty killer.) These days, though, you can’t flip through the channels for more than five minutes without coming across one of these audience-generated clips, bookended on either side by a graphic artist’s fever dream. It’s a side effect of ubiquitous recording devices – the TV news has appropriated the public as unpaid content providers, and the public, in response, is submitting amateur work. Very amateur work. Work so amateur, much of it can be done by feral chickens with smartphones taped to their heads.

 

The reason these amateur videos don’t fit the TV screen properly is simple. People hold their phones the wrong way.

 

You don’t have to be watching TV to see this happen. Anyone with a Facebook account – meaning everyone except a handful of villagers in Zimbabwe – can see these videos eating up their computer and smartphone screens like flesh-eating bacteria. What happens is that Aunt Maude, sitting peacefully on a rocking chair on her back porch, spots a nearby squirrel juggling acorns in his front paws and banging his head in rhythm to the blast-beats of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” Maude thinks, “Wait’ll my friends back in Tupelo get a load of this!” She whips out her phone to take video, but because she’s in a hurry, she holds it right-side up. Instead of being shot in a normal, sensible widescreen, the video looks like it was shot through a coffin-shaped keyhole, an off-looking vertical orientation that causes more headaches than the snare drum of a high school marching band.

 

This vertical format does nothing good for the framing. The squirrel is a small blip down at the bottom, barely discernible. Meanwhile, the upper two-thirds of the video consists mainly of power lines and a billboard advertising see-through thermal underwear.

 

Now granted, I’m not a smartphone user. Maybe I’m a Luddite, but I consider them to be an evil technology; though they offer convenience in the form of Internet access and instant photos of genitalia, they sap attention spans and addict their users to hyper-connectedness and “virtual” culture. Until the past couple of years, I resignedly accepted that. It annoyed me to constantly see peoples’ faces lit by the glow of their mobile devices, but as I was not one of them, I let it roll off my back.

 

I can’t do that anymore. Phones are now content-generating machines, and a lot of that content ends up on websites and TV shows. I was surfing through channels a couple of months ago and stumbled across “America’s Funniest Videos,” a show I didn’t know still existed. They were showing a themed clip package – kitten mishaps, adorable – and amidst of a crop of regular videos, there it was, a vertical job that effectively utilized about 15 percent of my available screen space. A cat was jumping off a kitchen counter and landing awkwardly in his water dish. Because of the video’s top-to-bottom aspect ratio, I got a lovely view of peach-colored ceiling tiles, and a spot of water damage just to the left of the refrigerator. Great framing, bub. Spielberg is weeping into an Indiana Jones hat.

 

Sometimes I wonder what will happen after humans go extinct – whether there’ll be any advanced species from our cosmic neighborhood combing through the detritus we’ve left behind. They may not be able to understand our texts, written in alien tongues. But our digital files, including our smartphone videos, are encoded in a binary format – that simple on/off language which should be easily readable by any star-surfing explorers. So let’s envision a hypothetical. Let’s say Poobuns, a humanoid creature from the planet Dyspepsia, touches down on Earth in the year 4872. One of the first things Poobuns encounters upon landing is an ancient smartphone, buried under the rubble of the Early 21st Century Heritage Museum in Hackensack, New Jersey. After puzzling over it for some time, Poobuns figures out how to connect the old phone to a power source and, amazingly, it still works. Since it operates via touchscreen, and Poobuns has 12 fingers on each hand, it’s only a short while before he’s swiping through photos of smiling children and curly fry baskets from Applebee’s.

 

Then he comes across a video. He’s disoriented at first because, like a human Earthling, he’s got two eyes horizontally arranged on his face; his eyesight, therefore, is panoramic in nature, and his instinct is to view the video left-to-right, lengthwise. Poobuns then figures out his mistake and turns the phone on its side.

 

“Why,” he wonders, “would you frame a video in such a manner if your eyesight is naturally panoramic? Judging from this species’ movie projectors and TV screens, that’s how everything else is shot. All you’d have to do is rotate this device a mere 90 degrees. Silly creatures. No wonder they’re extinct.”

 

Bemused, Poobuns tosses the device over one shoulder, where it lands atop a pile of debris, still playing this digital home movie. The rocket boosters on Poobuns’ alien ship drowns out the noise of a raucous Slayer tune issuing from the smartphone’s tinny speakers, and on the screen, a squirrel juggles nuts – banging his little head in the smoldering wasteland of eternity.