Fifteen seconds in Bangkok

Making short video taught me that attention is not the same thing as interest.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2022-08-05 · Craft

The video that worked was the one I almost did not post.

It was shot on a phone, held badly, in a stairwell, because the room I had booked was too echoey and I had run out of afternoon. No script. I said the thing I had been trying to say in a polished ninety second version for two weeks, except this time I said it in about eleven seconds because I was annoyed and in a hurry.

It went further than anything I made on purpose that year.

The obvious lesson is that people can smell effort and dislike it. I do not think that is right. The polished version failed because it was arranged for the middle of the video. The stairwell one had the point at the front, before anyone had decided whether to keep watching, and it turns out the entire discipline is that. You are not making a short film. You are making a sentence that survives being interrupted.

What I did not enjoy was what it did to my attention afterwards. For a few months I watched everything at speed, mentally trimming it. A meal becomes a shot. A market becomes b roll. I could feel myself editing my own afternoon while I was in it, and that is a strange way to be alive, even if the numbers go up.

The other thing that stayed with me is how little the numbers meant. A hundred thousand people watching for eleven seconds is not a hundred thousand people who know anything about you. It is closer to weather. Most of the businesses I have worked on since are built on the opposite arithmetic: fewer people, longer, with money changing hands.

I still make short video when there is a reason. I no longer keep the analytics tab open.