Hi, I'm Cassie, and I'm kind of obsessed with vloggers. It's a bit cringey to admit, but yes, I am one of those people who will spend their evenings watching YouTubers clean their house and do their food shop. Wow, that felt good to get off my chest.
I wanted to see just how difficult vlogging in public actually is, so I set myself four challenges:
1. Vlog in public.
2. Vlog on the tube.
3. Vlog in a shop.
4. Do a "story time" video.
It turns out vlogging was a lot harder than I thought.
To ease myself into vlogging I decided to start off with plain old vlogging on the street. I talk to myself a lot in my head, and sometimes under my breath, so I was all, "This will be fine, it's just the same but you'll look like a cool young vlogger rather than a frizzy-haired Brummie talking in tongues to herself." I was wrong. People were looking, and I felt less "up-and-coming celeb" and more "creep who cannot physically hold up a camera for more than 10 seconds".
Honestly, I can't stress enough that the camera vloggers use is heavy – they get serious points for that kind of bicep muscle quality. I also learned about my angles, and that I don't know them – the weight of the camera meant I held it low down at a very unforgiving angle, which is fine if you want to look like an uncooked sausage, I suppose.
Obviously, it's not ideal to vlog on the tube due to all the screeching, but I've watched plenty of vloggers do it, and I've even seen a few lookbook videos set on the tube (these are videos cool people do where they film their outfits and look away from the camera looking cooler than I'll ever be), so I thought that aesthetically, maybe it's a cool thing to do. Again, I was wrong. I'm new to London, but even I know that doing anything more on the tube than just sitting is an offence that will earn you plenty of dirty looks, and that's exactly what I got!
You can't see it but here there was a man behind the camera staring right into my soul and about to call my mum and tell her what a terrible human I am, I just knew it. So I had to apologise weirdly and get off at the next stop because I am a human who likes everyone to like me and I just couldn't do it.
It was coming up to Father's Day, so to ensure I was being true to the genre of "a day in my life" videos I thought I should document myself card shopping. Like any Brit, I feel like an inconvenience in a shop 99% of the time but wow, this was that taken to a whole new level, and I can safely say I will never take a giant camera into a shop again. It's obvious it makes customers a bit uncomfortable and that's not really okay with me.
After sweating profusely and buying my dad the first card I saw, one of a dog barbecuing, I got my scared ass out of there as fast as possible. I find it stressful enough getting my purse out in a shop and paying fast enough so as not to annoy the customer behind me, so holding a camera while doing it took the piss a little and made me feel pretty bad.
There's, er, really not much to say about this. "Story time" videos are sit-down videos in which vloggers tell implausible stories. The problem is, I am not an interesting person, and nor do I have any tales to rival classic story time videos like "I was kidnapped" or "Hoe stepsister: I stole her crush". I instead went with the most interesting, and potentially intimate, thing that has happened to me in a while, which was a chocolate wrapper falling out of my pocket on a train and on to a random man, and me having to awkwardly pick it up off his hand. I learned that I am unfunny and not cut out for this story time malarkey.
Vlogging is way harder than I originally thought – it takes a lot of balls to just chat about your day in public and feel comfortable enough to film everything you do. I have to give credit to them for knowing their angles and not looking in the viewfinder (the tiny screen you can see yourself in; I'm a narcissist, I know). I got pissed off at myself for doing that and then got more pissed off because I hate when vloggers do it – I owe them a big apology.
I can see why you would be inclined to do more things to make your vlog interesting or dramatise events for more interesting content, because I found that being a giant loser does not help your vlogging. Overall, I am glad I tried it, but I am also very glad I am not a vlogger, and I never want to film myself sweating buckets on the tube again.
If you want to see how I got on, here you go:
