On seeing myself on screen

Iris in the mountains as seen from behind during a vacation in France in 2011

Over the past month I have seen myself on screen more than I have in recent memory. This has everything to do with re-starting my #TinyAdventures journey by video blogging my day, but also because I am currently (finally) editing old family footage that I've been carrying with me for the better part of 4 years. The whole working from home video conferencing thing is also still happening. The old saying about the camera adding 10 pounds seems to be holding true. I am seeing myself from a different perspective and sometimes it makes me think that I need to lose weight to look good on screen. Of course, my goal has never been to be on screen, but rather behind it creating new things. However, as I don't really have access to anyone else at the moment (and I tend to feel awkward asking people to act), I am a character in my own work more than ever. Anyway, the thing I have been thinking about so much is the whole 'looking big' on screen. It is so easy to become self-critical when seeing yourself moving and walking and talking on screen. It is so easy to find all your flaws. But, to me it led to a contemplation of both optics (as in, camera lenses) and just generally the type of people who have made it their job to be on screen.

Equipment

A lot of how people look on screen can be brought back to the equipment they use. And with that I basically mean everything apart from the camera itself. It's the lenses and the lights that make you look good. This is why taking a good selfie on your phone is partly an art form in and of itself. Very few people will use external lenses when taking a selfie. More use external lighting, but that is also rare. And even the light you use needs to be right. Most fluorescent lighting has a tendency to flicker at a frequency that can be picked up by a camera (depending on a frame rate). LED or just old fashioned tungsten lighting doesn't have that issue, but can be more difficult to work with (tungsten especially) due to the space it takes up. The direction of the light influences how you look too. If you're only lit from above or from the side, sharp shadows will form. The lighting in a normal house is not designed to make you look good, it designed so you are able to do things without bumping into anything. The same can be said about camera lenses to a certain extend. The lens on your phone (unless you've got one of those multiple lenses in the back affairs) is there to capture things as they are. However, 'as they are' is effected greatly be the distance of the subject from the camera (phone) in question. (As someone with bad eyesight, the shifting of visibility and the distortion that can happen depending on the distance of the lens is something I'm intimately familiar with.) Using the right lens can make all the difference in how a person looks on screen. A wide angle lens will make a person close to the camera look extremely distorted and far wider than they actually are. It's hard to find a lens that completely accurately captures what we as humans see in a moment. This is why there are so many different types of lenses available for cameras. It should also be noted that cameras usually only capture a 2D representation of a 3D object (once again, there are exceptions). It flattens  everything it captures into one layer. Only the shadow and light can add depth to the image. This is why using the right lens and the right light can make you look more 'normal' on screen. Of course, we are inundated with visual representations of humans every day that have been made using external lighting and specialist lenses, and we have started to see this as 'normal' instead of the exception. But it is the exception.

Personal Appearance

The actors, presenters and even the reality stars we see on screen look so different from real-life that it is sometimes difficult to remember that, although they are real people, they are not 'normal' people. They are people who have shaped themselves to be on screen, to be aware of the '10 pounds' rule, to look as flawless as possible. We, the 'normal' people, probably have not built our lives around any of that. I know how to look okay on screen, but I will not put in the hours of work that professional screen personalities do. I can't afford to most of the time. I can't afford a personal trainer and dietician and make-up artist and wardrobe. You probably can't either. So I look 'normal' when I'm on screen. Maybe I wear slightly nicer clothes than I would otherwise do, but for the most part I do not change myself. Even the professional YouTube personalities and Instagram influencers work on their screen presence more than you probably realise. So what I am trying to get at is that even in spaces like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, 'normal' is subjective. Being widely accessible does not actually mean that you get to see people under normal circumstances. What is being broadcast on most video and image based channels is highly curated content created to give a specific image of a person. As someone who tries to do the same, it would be hypocritical of me to say that that is wrong. But as people keep repeating, what you see online is not the real world. The online version of me is far more organised that the version of me I am in my personal life. I am a lot better at talking to  camera than I am talking to an actual person, most of the time. I will look shorter in real-life compared to how I look in videos, simply because the videos are shot from my eye level. There is so much that I have control over when it comes to my image online that I cannot control if you see me in the real world. That is an important thing to remember. The person who appears in a photo or video that appears on their own social media channel has a huge amount of control over that image before it is released to the public. That control is partly physical appearance, partly editing and a whole load of being able to make a choice in what people see. To be able to make those choices is a powerful tool that should be wielded with skill and is often invisible to the audience. I try to be open about who I am in my presence online, but I also know that I use a certain part of my personality to appeal to people to gain a certain amount of approval which I would not seek in real-life. What you see is not completely what you get, but it is close to it.

In the End

What I am trying to get at is that seeing a 'normal' person on screen is rare and not usually actually the case. I look bigger on camera than I do in real-life. So do many other people, partly through the mechanisms of the camera itself, but partly also because of the way they present themselves in front of a camera. A screen personality is always just a part of a full person, even if you are trying to capture the true essence of who they are. Nobody can be fully understood through the screen, if anybody can be fully understood at all.