Video and Regular Blog Final Project

Starting out with the idea for a video blog I was excited to encourage engagement in Canadian politics through performance in video blogs though I had not decided on a select topic, I had started out with recording myself talking to get familiar with the idea of vlogging. I knew I wanted to put up a sort of satirical persona much like that of Jenna Marbles, a well known, charismatic youtube vlogger, while addressing Canadian politics. Performing on camera proved to be incredibly challenging as I discovered that I am a horrible actor and my attempts seemed to fail miserably. I consider myself to be quirky but I had a very difficult time forcing this quirk on camera—it just wasn’t natural.

For my first vlogs that I shot and edited, I tried to concentrate on the Canadian federal election scandal, which was in the news in February. I tried to experiment with different personas, the first being a really airheaded personality type vaguely explaining the federal election scandal and whining about it—it was not cute. I wasn’t happy with the video at all but it was part of the experimentation process.

The second persona was more sincere and less of an act where as the first persona seemed obviously performed. This video cut more to the point and seemed more natural although there had a lot of work to be desired.  With the discovery that I am horrible at acting I decided that a more natural and sincere approach would be more successful instead of my primary idea to create a pseudo-personality completely unlike myself.  

Noting the poor quality of these first couple videos shot with the webcam and microphone on my laptop, I continued to make videos but I tried working towards better technical quality. I rented out a camera and tripod and put more thought and effort into the technical productions. As a result, the aesthetic and sound of my next few videos had changed significantly. In terms of content, I wanted to stick to a more natural and sincere approach but also branching out a bit from the federal election fraud scandal. I shot myself discussing different topics as a more serious persona, more genuine to myself. 

Topics I had discussed along with the federal election scandal were the Kony 2012 campaign and the omnibus crime bill.  Wanting to take a more naturalistic approach, I shot two videos discussing the federal election scandal; one where I discussed it from the information I know and another where I had researched a little bit more. Howerever, where the technical aspects had improved, I was still lacking in my presentation or the information.  With the videos being unscripted, I allowed a much greater leeway for awkward um’s, like’s and uh’s which would have made it hard to gracefully edit it together. I was still struggling to get some sort of solid direction for this project.

Finally while progressing forward with my vlog I steered away from the Canadian Federal Election scandal all together in favour of a more personal approach. In earlier stages of the vlogging process I was just reporting information without really relating it to myself. In my most recent attempt, I introduced my narrative as an art student in debt and I discussed the Canadian budget as it relates to my financial situation. I think taking this approach has helped a lot in making my vlog more appealing as well as allowing me to display my quirky personality, which I think may make it easier the viewer to relate to me as a person. I covered parts on the budget such as budget cuts to Toronto services, worker lay offs and rehabilitation programs as well as cuts on a federal scale to sectors like health and public safety. I discussed where taxes are going if not to these services and sectors I mentioned and finally provided ways to get involved with politics. With the whole point of my vlog to promote political engagement, I found that it was very important to mention ways of getting involved, something I lacked in previous videos. 

My initial idea was to work towards a developed youtube channel and personality but again, since performing is not my strong suit, I decided a blog featuring some of my vlogs might be more successful. I created a blog and named it “I Can Has Politics,” with a photo of a cat using a computer. The cat being typical Internet humour that expanded to a broad range of people. Initially, my goal was to encourage political engagement with youth and I specified that on my blog but as I thought about it more, I decided that I didn’t want to limit my audience to just youth. Of course I believe a lot of apathy for politics occurs in the younger generation, I believe that knowledge and information should be available to everyone, so while I may still want to target youth, I decided not to specify this in order not to discourage other potential viewers. While I wanted to encourage political engagement, I also wanted to encourage viewers to think for themselves and make their own decision, which is why I added links to my sources of information in order to encourage viewers to check out these issues for themselves.

You can find my blog here.