![]() These creatives were exploring the affordances of a new media form by negotiating and developing conventions that suited their technical knowledge, practical capabilities, and desire to invent their own personal style. Newman (2008) suggests, early video bloggers were “making it up as they along, discovering common solutions to shared problems” in what Maximiliane Frobenius notes was, at that time, “a genre so young that the conventions still in a process of negotiation”. Others, though, such as the one described above, are more ‘vlogging-specific’, and seem to have emerged from the very affordances and social environments of the Internet and online video platforms such as YouTube. Some of these uses of the jump cut reflect the more traditional forms that you might commonly see in mainstream media such as television programs, feature films, or advertisements. Neistat, who almost always shoots and edits his own work, has employed the ‘jump cut’ (Trustees of Columbia University, 2015) video editing tool for various uses over the years - to the point where it is very much a part his personal vlogging style. There is an authenticity in a famed creator presenting themselves as fallible, though, and authenticity is a convention of video blogs that stems back to their emergence as a new moving image genre (Tufnell, 2013). Indeed, one of these two approaches would likely have been undertaken if the video was being made for a more formal media outlet, such as free-to-air or cable television. Neistat could have either reshot himself introducing the actors at the time or found a way in the edit to identify the two actors without using the bungled take. If anything, my engagement is heightened by the creativity Neistat employed in recovering from his minor blunder, and I am reminded of his tendency to approach his filmmaking in a ‘show - don’t tell’ way. ![]() The next shot, a continuation of the first shot of Neistat, cuts in abruptly with him in mid-sentence as he continues his previously interrupted monologue.Īs a viewer who is cognitively involved in making sense of the text, I’m not confused by what happens on screen, and I’m not disturbed by the obviousness of Neistat’s on-screen fumble. This insert ends in silence over their frozen image. ![]() Instead of allowing his own sentence to continue in this disaster of a shot, Neistat abruptly cuts to a short stylised slow-motion insert shot featuring the two actors in question - complete with their names assigned in text on the screen. Stuttering, he completes it, but then continues to stumble towards the second actor’s name. As Neistat begins introducing the two famous actors, however, he seems to momentarily forget the first actor’s name. He’s addressing the camera directly, as is customary to the aesthetic of most vlogs (Tolson, 2010), and is explaining what’s going to happen in the next scene. Neistat is perhaps one of the world’s most famous vloggers - having currently over 11 million YouTube channel subscribers and over two and a half billion total views across his 1,000+ videos (Social Blade, 2020). I’m watching one of Casey Neistat’s video blog, or ‘vlog’, episodes, Movie stars prank the press (2016). The vlogging space is rich in moving image innovation and instances of this, such as the vlogging jump cut, need to be identified, analysed, and discussed - just as occurred for cinema and television during their past periods of emergence. This paper argues that vlogging culture has not only adopted the jump cut as core to its productions, but also adapted and evolved it for specific vlog use. It could even be said now that jump cutting a monologue is one of the inherent conventions of vlogging. In the early days of online video platforms, such as YouTube, video bloggers employed jump cuts while editing their direct-address monologues to allow them to string together the best parts of the performance. Traditionally, the term ‘jump cut’ has described film or video edits that jump forward in time and detract from a sense of continuity. The great jump cut (r)evolution: A case for studying the evolution of vlogging production techniques
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