The “Powerful” Videographer
Ariel is a professional videographer who resides in Argentina. He is an excellent writer who contributes regularly to our Blog site with philosophical articles related to videography and all that relates to it. We thank him for this latest article, we did our best to translate it from Spanish to the English language while keeping it true to the original.
It’s cloudy. I walk down Córdoba street and I think …
In my achievements, I, social videographer, “re-build” (I build again) part of reality. The party for which I was hired will not speak for itself in my record, the client has conferred me the “power” to narrate the facts; I am the intermediary that will put it in relation with audiovisual composition. I am the one who “tells the story”, or better: “a story”, in which drops of my value systems, my books, my ideologies and the cultural currents that condition my way of seeing the world will infiltrate.
The term “power”, written above, alludes to the power that the videographer has over his production, to that plural faculty that allows him to choose, discard, correct, select, prefer, set aside, omit, order, combine and edit.
I come to the corner of the Augustus bar with the certainty that it is very, very easy for us, videographers, to fall into the trap of power, overestimate our role in the heart of society that allows us to exist. The “power” that the client gives us is temporary, temporary, and linked to a circumstance. I admit that without a videographer there is no programmed audiovisual record, but not true that the event would be canceled if we are not present. The task we carry out matters, and much, but with the commitment to record a party, for example, “we are pawns articulated from a mechanism, not ” the “mechanism”.
I break open a sugar packet and it is lost in the coffee. Whatsapp. On Monday afternoon, then? Yes, yes, I’ll wait for you on Monday, I answer. Yesterday a client brought me a recording of her daughter’s wedding, held outside of Argentina. It seems that the couple did not like the work that the foreign videographers did, nor the members of the family, with whom I have a prolonged commercial relationship; I understand that they could have just become accustomed to my style, the truth is that they asked for a re-edit according to my judgement, also that it include images collected by some of the guests …
-In the end, the video will be different -clearly-, the integrated music I do not like, I would also change that and …
-That is precisely what we want Ariel, a video different from the one I brought you. I trust your criteria, I leave it in your hands …
The power issue comes back to my thinking, but now a new concept adds to my reflection: the truth. I’ll summarize it in some way in the next paragraph.
A powerful videographer works with the truth, but when he delivers his video he will have, at the same time have created a product that will not be either true or false, or maybe we could agree that it would be true but also false, and vice versa. Any audiovisual product can (or could) be otherwise, that is why I wonder where “the truth fits in” in our videos. Once I wrote that Social Video could be placed or fluctuate between the fantastic and autobiographical genres, if this is so, then in the interstice that mediates between them, in that indeterminate zone where the essence of the video is in relation to the rest of the things, the whole effect of the truth would unfold “ … or maybe not, maybe the truth is everywhere and nowhere, since it is temporary, just like power.
I go back out to the street. It’s raining and somehow the sign of the old Ross Bookstore now looks a little bit newer with water
Professional Videographer/
Ariel García
Leave a Reply