Well, Iron Pineapple has. In fact, he’s collected quite a few followers which now makes us wonder how he came by such compelling magic. For anyone struggling to make videos to upload, this guy makes it look too easy. But we know that it’s not easy. Perhaps he gets by on charm alone. Whatever the case may be, this is one of the channels I wanted to include in the little ‘performer hall of fame’ I’ve been putting together here.
“Steam Dumpster Diving” is a wonderful concept. It’s sort of like what I’m trying to do here on this blog. But that endeavor alone makes the work appreciable, and Iron Pineapple handles it with grace and with an economy of language and editing. Although, some of that language is as course as it is light-hearted.
At any rate, in my previous post about Game Sack, I thought afterwards that I had perhaps downplayed the role of editing in a video. Since I have only minimal experience with this, I can’t tell you precisely what makes for good or bad editing, but I can tell you that a poorly edited and mixed video will probably make me turn it off before my brain even registers that I’ve watched anything. I am starting to realize that what I said previously about concision counts for even more than I had once gathered. If it did not, we would not be seeing as many annoying jump-cuts as we do from the majority of uploaded videos.
It seems that the choices made in editing, such as cuts and transitions, are creative ones. They are creative in that the variety of editing options, while multitudinous, affect the delivery of the message that the writer has previously decided. The editor must think about how these cuts and transitions affect the message. If the cuts were standardized to a high degree, or if they were chaotic and random, the video would not match the narration, regardless of what was being shown from cut to cut. Iron Pineapple tends to use rough jump-cuts accompanied by a jaunty, light-hearted tune, to convey his comedic experience of being surprised by all the weird things that pop up on his dumpster diving excursions. It accentuates the experience, making the content more digestible while bringing the viewer parallel to the viewpoint of the author in a smooth and enjoyable way.
While it may seem somewhat ephemeral to discuss, one trend that we might associate with good aesthetics has to do with supplying creative variety within an understood, defined space. Limitless variety is overwhelming and detached from real human experience, while rigid regulation is oppressive to the soul. But this is a topic we’ll get into later. For now, we have one more thing to think about when it comes to why one video is better than another.
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