watching more of the hbomberguy video and just
christ
i'm just sitting here feeling bad by proxy. like, I feel like I should go back and make sure I have thorough credits in my old videos. i think i'm good, I feel like the bylines pretty much as soon as I started using onscreen graphics, partly because it just seemed like the done thing i think the sole exception is a single clip from a 12voltvids video that I used in my indextron video, which I inexplicably did not cite on screen or out loud; I have no idea why, and I still feel bad about it three years later.
i also don't cite any photos i get from ebay because, i mean. ebay sellers have no reason to care about their random product photo getting credited. but like, maybe i should just do that anyway, who's it going to hurt? certainly not me. i actually have a real nice workflow where I just save every single file i get online as the exact byline, which I HIGHLY recommend if you're a video producer; it saves gobs of effort. every ebay photo has to be renamed anyway because they all download as "s-1600.jpg", an incredibly irritating behavior, so... yeah, fuck it.
anyway, stories about plagiarism are always the same: you wonder "why even do this?" i cannot imagine the sheer stabbing pain of trying to make an entire video out of other people's words. it would feel like waterboarding myself. christ, i can't even compel myself to read quotes intact if there's room to paraphrase them. it's not easier to try to chop up someone else's words than to just write your own.
one thing that keeps eating at me: who is watching these plagiarized videos and not noticing that all the narration is literary and not oratory??? it's all so fucking awkward! words that sound good on paper often don't sound good out loud. this happens to me every single time i shoot a video! i always find out that there are things that looked great in the script, but just can't be said out loud, it just doesn't work. you say it, and then you go "oh god that's nothing" and you have to rewrite it, there's no alternative. these people just... say it anyway, and it's unbelievably awkward, and i can't imagine why the audience just keeps listening to the worst oration they've ever heard. these people all sound like fifth graders being forced to read aloud out of the book in class, because they almost literally are. how do people tolerate listening to it
man. all this shit, and here i am going "oh man do i need to feel bad about using 4 seconds of credited footage from this other youtuber who didn't reply to my email asking for permission" like you just wonder sometimes why you even bother
