YouTube for ArtistesThe Web video site Vimeo goes after an audience tired of the poorly lit basement aesthetic.
Posted Tuesday, April 7, 2009, at 5:54 PM ET
My nomination for the most mesmerizing minute and 34 seconds of video on the Web is nothing more than a meditation on a stretch of power lines as thousands of birds come and go at sunset. What the clip lacks in plot, it makes up for with fantastic production. Wes Johnson, a photographer in Mesa, Ariz., who created the piece, shot the scene with a high-definition camera that allows you make out individual birds as they come and go on the swaying lines. Johnson sets the video to Yann Tiersen's "L'autre Valse d'Amélie," from the Amelie soundtrack, laid down with startling synchronicity to the images.
Unlike many popular videos online, Johnson's clip—which I found on Jason Kottke's blog—features no cute children, ironically profane white rappers, nor any other staples of viral video stars. Perhaps that's why the clip didn't make its splash on YouTube. Instead, Johnson posted it to an alternative video-sharing site, the Web's best place to find beautiful videos. It's called Vimeo.
powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo.
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StumbleUponAbout 73 million people visit YouTube every month, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete. Vimeo gets just a tiny fraction of that horde, fewer than 3 million. But the content looks like it comes from the Web's most talented lot. Vimeo attracts a high-art, film-buff set—the kind of people who, when making movies for the Web, pause to consider such virtues as cinematography, framing, music, and composition. You could argue that those concepts don't matter much in the digital world, at least as far as page views are concerned; some of the most popular videos ever to wash up on the shores of the Web—"Numa Numa," Laughing Baby, "Evolution of Dance"—were shot on cheap cameras in uncertain light and are blighted by poor sound. But that's precisely why watching Vimeo is a revelation. The videos here suggest that there is a market on the Web for good old-fashioned quality.
Not every video on Vimeo is amazing, of course. Some are boring or incoherent, and more than a few seem to be trying too hard to be artistic. What's astounding about Vimeo is its high ratio of signal to noise. Most of the videos posted here, even the terrible ones, are at least trying to say something interesting. That's a lot more than can be said of much of what you see on YouTube.
Vimeo has been growing rapidly over the last few months, and nowadays its videos spread widely online. I was originally clued in to Vimeo's rising profile by a recent film called "The Crisis of Credit Visualized," by Jonathan Jarvis, a graduate student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Jarvis uses simple diagrams and clear on-screen text to explain the roots of the financial crisis, for the most entertaining and informative 11 minutes I've spent on the Web this year. Jarvis posted the video on YouTube, too, but the higher-quality Vimeo version saw much more action. More than 1.5 million people have watched Jarvis' video on Vimeo; half as many saw it on YouTube.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
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