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Casey Neistat’s Filmmaking Style is Popular
Casey
Neistat is one of my favorite filmmakers and I have more than a hunch that I am
not alone. His youtube videos have over
a billion views. His ‘Do More’ Nike
commercial and youtube videos such as ‘Bike Lanes’ show his unique style. I will expostulate on why I like Casey
Neistat’s style and why I think his style has such mass appeal to others.
First
let me describe Casey Neistat’s style as I see it. His youtube videos at their heart are simply
video clips cut and put together in a specific order. He makes his own titles and often credits by
shooting them as video and adding them later, as opposed to using a program to
generate them, such as windows movie maker or imovie. Besides audio, his clips are rarely
enhanced. This gives his videos a very
home movie feel and look, they are clearly not polished products of much
editing and enhancement. Since a large
portion to a majority of his footage is filmed directly by himself, his videos
have an inherent first person perspective, which is enhanced by his
narrations. In my opinion, his style is
an anti-establishment way of filmmaking, perhaps even gonzo. He doesn’t seek to produce a polished,
glossed, enhanced, or finished quality to his films. I believe this is at the heart of why so many
people find his filmmaking style entertaining, both immediately in a visual
sense and at a philosophical level.
Visual
media of all kinds ranging from magazines to television to movies is a highly
polished product. Photos and videos have
been enhanced to maximize color contrast and balance. The human subjects of those photos and videos
have been enhanced as well; skin smoothed over, blemishes removed, muscles
toned up, proportions altered, and so on.
Something like 95% of images and video are altered or enhanced in some
way. The enhancing and altering
phenomena have become pervasive. These
enhanced, glossy, finished photos and videos are the normal and thus are no
longer impressive. Since they are so
overwhelmingly common, the consumer takes them for granted; they no longer
catch the user’s eye. Given this world
where the consumer is fully acculturated to visual smoothness, something less
polished, something raw is bound to draw the consumer’s eye, simply out of fact
that it is different from 95 to 99% of other more enhanced media. I believe this is the first way Casey
Neistat’s style stands out and excites people.
The
second way Casey Neistat’s filmmaking style is popular is that it is original,
that is, it appeals to peoples’ desire for the authentic. How can a media that is so enhanced, so
glossed, so altered be authentic? The
consumer knows that the image is an enhanced image designed to maximize its
ascetic and emotional appeal to them. I
believe there is an inherent distrust consumers have built into the main mass
media, based on the distortions the main media incorporate into their photos
and videos.[1] Consumers do not fully trust a media that
alters its product so much. There is a
disconnect between consumers and the media products they consume. Casey Neistat taps into that. By not enhancing his videos and making them
seem less professional, he is able to get viewers to trust him more because
what they are viewing is not such a finely tuned finished product. His films do not visually deceive the
consumer. By keeping them the way he
shot them, his films have an authenticity that other more polished films cannot
produce. Casey Neistat taps into the
human desire for the authentic.
This
connection with the authentic that makes users pay attention to his videos, I
believe is the reason why companies such as Nike and Jcrew hire Casey Neistat
to make commercials for them. These
companies are trying to get a commercial that will get users to pay attention
to their message, a glossy, enhanced commercial gets lost in the crowd with the
other 95-99%.
So
Casey Neistat’s filmmaking style is popular because his style is different than
the mainstream and because his style appeals to the human desire for the
authentic.
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