vicarious video

I had an idea the other day – something I’ve never heard of, but figure someone else must have thought about before me. I was watching a video blog (from National Geographic, I think) about Yellowstone National Park. I’ve been wishing for the past couple years that we had time and money to take a vacation to Yellowstone, but we haven’t.

As I was watching the video online, I got to thinking that it would be nice if someone would just take a video camera and decent microphone and go videotape a bunch of the attractions, and then release it to the public. This would be sort of a documentary film, but wouldn’t include a bunch of voice-over and edits to compact it into a short period of time. Instead, what I was imagining was a DVD you could pop in and have the TV just show the sights and sounds of being in another place for an hour at a time.

Given the short attention span of most audiences, I’m sure many videographers would be tempted to put this sort of thing together with flashy titles, background music, a narrator, and so on. But what I’m imagining would be very raw – just audio and video of being in this other particular place at a particular time.

Has anyone heard of such a thing? If so, what’s it called? And how do I find videographers who are doing this? It seems like it would be cool to have a website with a map and a whole collection of this sort of videos, so people could download them and be transported to wherever they want to go. In my case, Yellowstone. For others, maybe my back yard in Broomfield or a restaurant kitchen in Bangladesh or walking along a canal in Amsterdam.

Please post a comment with your thoughts on this concept. And maybe I’ll post a video of my own to show what I’m thinking of.

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Categorized as Film

1 comment

  1. Todd,
    This is a great idea! We have a few such videos from our recent trip to Jamaica. I suppose I could create a blog to upload the video for your enjoyment.
    The videos are very raw, and were taken with a digital still camera, but one that has some video capability. I’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned…

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