3 to 10 seconds people! Videos... Lot's of Video... Hours of Video!

Are you a modern human? Do you struggle with your attention span? Are you addicted to scrolling aimlessly? Then please train your eye's and ears on this page and challenge yourself. Watch all of these videos. Go on... I DARE YOU!You may think I'm being facetious here. But I am not. The modern human certainly enjoys a great deal of video input. There is a great emphasis on creating video content now and the rise of the professional youtuber is a strange and baffling phenomenon. I am a great fan of youtube and much of it's content but it would seem that my attention span is longer than the bulk of content consumers. Frankly I am dismayed and slightly perturbed by the attention people pay to anything these days, whether it be art, politics, history, philosophy or anything that actually matters. Now cats playing pianos, twerkers setting their asses on fire and dogs saying I love you. Well we all know people love that stuff. Video is an escape from reality I guess, but why does it appear that the majority of the western world seem so vacantly shallow and distracted that they are unable to retain their attention for more than 2 minutes. In fact looking through youtube statistics the average cut-off for videos which are over 4 minutes in 42 seconds. If videos are below 4 minutes the attention span goes up to 2 minutes 20 seconds. This is just one of many strange and measurable phenomena present on youtube, however when you get into the realms of social media the level of weirdness begins to reach levels of complete absurdity. Now when I film and edit these videos I have to take into account these confusing concepts, but when you are making films that are 10 minutes or longer it's almost impossible to tell a story with any cohesive narrative if you try to accommodate the wont of the modern viewers. It is frustrating, as you can tell. Still the purpose of a lot of these films is to tell a story, to document something that happened in life and recycle it for as long as youtube's servers keep up their connection. This is a valuable legacy and this my friends, is what makes the whole thing worth it. Now the first video here... The Making of Jarlath Henderson's album 'Hearts Broken Heads Turned' Is 36 minutes, I have probably spent 20 hours watching this during it's edit, the sound alone took my 6 hours to mix, only after it had been edited, re-edited and exported numerous times. Even just doing the volume rides took about 2 hours and then I had to EQ and compress each passage of dialogue, mix and effect the in the room recorded music and then try to mitigate the effects of traffic noise, 60hz hum and scuzzy room acoustics. Then there's the colour, the transitions, deciding how long the gaps between scenes should be. I could go on but you get the picture don't you? The average view time for this video is 6 minutes, so maybe this is a success? It has performed better than youtube suggest it might. Whatever, it is what it is... Maybe I should spent less time on making videos and just smash them out? That's what I did with the second video here. Ross Ainslie and his band came into the office, we put up two mics, DI'd the fiddle and guitar. The band smashed out some takes, we chose one of them. Mixed the sound in an hour or so. Synced up the 2 cameras, cut between them, encoded it and uploaded it. From start to finish this took 4 hours. It is a testament to the talent of the band and they played really well. Not perfectly and the DI's sound pretty bad. This video got 23,000 views in just over a week. Now on the surface this seems good doesn't it? Wow 20,000 views! That's successful isn't it? The answer is NO! This video was uploaded to facebook and only 17% of people watched it till the end. The average drop of time was 57 seconds and the majority of the view metrics are based on people who watched it between 3 to 10 seconds. 3 to 10 seconds people! I repeat 3 to 10 seconds! #facepalmSo what have I learned here? Modern life is rubbish, people have attention spans akin to gold fish and that facebook metrics are about as true as anything else you see on it socially corrosive, ignorance spreading, menial life sapping platform. So don't be fooled by the awkward popularity contest! It is meaningless, empty and devoid of any empirical substance. I don't like this facebook! I do not LIKE THIS! Please take note, folks. You may be impressed by high viewing figures but you shouldn't be.