My mind churned after a fascinating article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail newspaper. A story from Uruguay; on putting a face on the nation, via YouTube; Tiranos Temblad. Hola, YouTube – the new way of learning more; about your place, people, community, brand. And, telling a story.
Tiranos Temblad
Two artists are documenting the life of Uruguay, one week – and dozens of hours of YouTube footage – at a time. The artists are filmmaker Augustin Ferrando and photographer (ex-dentist) Fernando Montoro, partners in work and life.
On their YouTube channel, Tiranos Temblad, (@Tirranos_Temblad on Twitter), each week (or two), since 2012, they put up a short video (typically 5-10 minutes) montage of what’s happening in Uruguay, this week.
Each video is culled from up to 2,000 YouTube videos they screen each week. Each Tiranos Temblad video is comprised of hundreds of snippets, with ‘deadpan’ narration over top. Below is this week’s clip (#54). It’s in Spanish. No worry. Communication takes place.
(Can’t see the video, click here to watch on YouTube)
The spirit is quirky and authentic. Yet, there is structure. The material includes a ‘crack of the week’ (crack is Spanish slang for hotshot), and also content about what others, foreign-made content, are saying about Uruguay. It is popular; beloved as “the smell of home” by Urguayans. It makes “heroes out of common people”.
Ferrando and Montoro initiated the channel after reflecting on, why “is nobody doing anything with these kinds of things (YouTube content)?”
To date, they have resisted monetizing their channel. Though Ferrado dryly observes, “As a child, I thought I had to be a millionaire to be successful… and one day I woke up and I was successful and totally broke. So that’s interesting.”
YouTube is an opportunity for us
“Before YouTube, you had to enter people’s houses to see this intimacy, because if you put a camera on people, they changed the way they acted,” mused the filmmaker. “Now, for the first time in history, we’re so used to it that your kid or your grandpa is filming and you don’t change the way you would if a documentary cameraman had a camera on you. For me as a documentarian, I find it so exciting to have this (YouTube) material.” Indeed.
Uruguay’s population (3.5 million) is not far off the population of my home province (British Columbia 4.6 million). Hmmm…
What if. What if a week (or month) in British Columbia life? Or, maybe something more specific; e.g., sharing good deeds, by people for people?
YouTube is an opportunity; to put a face on place, community, customer… It is an opportunity to build your brand. Most importantly, it is an opportunity to learn about each other, and through storytelling, create connections between us.
What possibility comes to your mind, based on this example?
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