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 that is the discipline. A short video is 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 closer to weather than to a hundred thousand people who know anything about me. 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.

The job behind the videos had the same gap between how it sounded and what it was. On paper I managed Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. In practice there were no offices in any of them, and a market with no office is quiet. For long stretches the biggest thing on my calendar was the calendar.

Then the SEA Games came to Phnom Penh, TikTok decided Cambodia was its stage for ASEAN, and the quiet ended in a week. Ministries discovered that the government relations team for the whole country was one person, and that person's inbox became a queue. Mostly they wanted the blue tick. I verified ministers, ministries, spokesmen, federations, singers somebody's office vouched for. For a while I verified almost everyone official in Cambodia.

Then I learned, from someone whose job it was to know, that I was not supposed to be doing that at all. The ticks stayed. Nobody asked me to take them back.