I have always been the one, who wanted to be on the other side of Youtube. Vlogging was always a part of my life, but only until recently I became more confident in myself, so that I could make videos myself. Obviously long time before that I had to watch loads of them and to be honest I do still watch them. I have more than 100 subscriptions on Youtube, that's my guilty pleasure. As I have a lot of watching experience, I can try to explain what's for me cinematic vlogging.

Cinematic vlogging is extremely hard. Because not only you have to think about the narrative of the story, you are telling, but also you have to think about cinematography, it's aesthetic and meaning. That's what nearly impossible, because when you try to capture your everyday life it's hard to think about cinematography, as a lot of stuff happens really fast and there's no time to analyse - you just have to record the moment.

But there are certain people on the internet (and I have to stress that they are Youtube filmmakers), that managed to nail it.

I will start with my role model, as she is the woman filmmaker, which is hard to find nowadays. Her name is Hazel and the reason why I decided to show her work is her series "Time of the Month". During whole month she records her life, then reflects on it and edits in a beautiful video. There is may be not that many perfect cinematographic shots, but she tells her story amazingly! My personal favourite video from that series is August. It is emotional, has an artsy intro with a deep meaning and a beautiful cinematographic decisions and also a brilliant editing.



Hazel is not the only person, who does this sort of the videos. There tons of Youtubers with monthly vlogs. But she is my favourite so far.

There are also bloggers who do amazing travelling blogs. With traveling it is much easier, because you usually have a lot more time to think about constructing the story. Jack Howard for example (one more inspiration of mine, yes) does them really well. Obviously as a filmmaker. I don't know how, but he always creates an amazing narrative and edits the whole thing in a perfect video. Is that magic or a superpower? xD


The whole Youtube topic is overwhelming for me. I can talk about it for hours, but it is really hard to write. Making usual vlogs cinematic is hard, because essentially they are just videos from people's bedrooms. But it is possible to bring them to a new level. Even normal vlogs with talking to a camera. You can easily make them more cinematic by adding some more relatable shots or may be creating a sketch (if the channel is a comedy one). But anyway it is a lot of work. 

So here we are, the week of editing. Where we barely had any sleep, any food or rest itself. We are in every day no matter what and we fight with some computers that keep corrupting our work.

Transcription was a thing. We retyped all 30 minutes of the interview just to make sure that we include the most valuable and touching parts. The editing part was a collaboration mostly, so it's hard to say how exactly we split the work. We are just helping each other.

As putting all clips together not the most difficult part of the whole film, cause we already had a plan, we concentrated on colours and VFX for titles. Here we go. As I did titling in the end (once again, not without a help of the group) I will show you how on just one of the sequences.

Obviously I had to choose after effects. I already had some experience with after effects couple of years ago, but i needed to remember everything I knew. So here is the slight idea of what I was doing.

See the ceiling at the top of the shot?

I added a black solid layer to hide it and placed on a certain place at a certain time on the timeline.

There we go. No ceiling anymore.

An example of motion tracking. Here's how it goes. The bit on the left was made by the tracker that AE has. But I had to correct every point to make the action a lot smoother. The top one was entirely produced by me.

This is how it looks on the timeline. I had literally to correct every single frame.

Masking. Maskin. Masking. Pretty close to Photoshop, but with action bits.

Motion tracking of the mask, so that the text appears "out of nowhere".

This is our main sequence. Main editing process. A lot of stuff is happening there: BG music, upsync from the performances, interview, additional shots from performances and cutaways.

Yeah, this is the main process that we are going through during editing.

Here's a video example of the title from the above.

While we were doing our paperwork, I had to think about the concept. There is one amazing film about magicians. I honestly think that it's one of the bests itself. I you are a film nerd as I am, then "The Prestige" is probably already watched by you. May be even several times.

"The Prestige" is the most realistic film about magicians. That's what Sasha said. So I watched it once again. And came up with a concept based on the film.

Since we have moved on to making a documentary about a magician, we had to split our positions once again. So I became a director.

Directing was something I am aiming to specialise in. And as I ave never directed a documentary before I needed some research. Documentary directors are basically those, who create and ask questions and then narrate them during editing. Even though I had general idea about the personality of our subject, I still didn't really know what exactly he will tell us. So obviously before going straight into the interview I watched some of the documentaries about magicians and interviews with them.


This interview is mostly based on the personality. As Ronn Winter is a popular media person, viewers obviously would more like to know more about him, rather than the idea behind the industry and emotions that the performer may have during the performance. That was helpful in a sort of the way, but not all of the questions are really helpful. But what I liked about this particular interview is the setting. I always liked interviews that are taken in the studio. The only issue that I can see here is a weird lighting...


As I have never been a great fan of magic tricks and performances I also had to watch some more of them. Sasha Crespi - our subject, told us on our first meeting that he is not only a magician but he is also a mentalist. Not only did I watch a lot of different tricks, but also I watched different mentalists and their performances.

After that I kind of got the idea of how our final piece should look like.