UNDERDOG

Bit of a rant this week, folks!

Vimeo used to rule. When I first got into short films I didn’t know they were called short films, so I would say that I was into “Youtube videos”. They were grainy messes, probably compressed to 240p or something, but I loved them. Then I discovered Vimeo. There was a lot of the same stuff, sure, but there was so much more of what I was after. There were honest-to-god films on there – in stunning 480p!

This began a decade and a half (or so) love affair with the site. To begin with it was pretty basic, but the features added up quickly, and it just became better than Youtube in basically every way (except sheer volume of videos, but is that a good thing?). The main feature I loved was the expanded search function – you could search by length, genre, style, and loads of other stuff. Very useful for when you need a 5 minute film to round out an animation programme – just toggle length to 5 minutes, style to animation, and bob’s your uncle. You could even sort by popularity, which means it was easy to find a masterpiece that suited my needs with under 20 views. Finding these hidden gems came with a real sense of discovery.

And so we had a good few years of what I’m formally labelling the golden age of short film research. I found so many good films, and made real relationships with a lot of lovely filmmakers. It was so good. I’d fire up the website with a genuine sense of excitement.

And now, it’s something else entirely. It went corporate in seemingly the worst way possible. It’s all about ‘strategy’ and hosting videos for your company in such a way that you optimise workflow or whatever. It constantly tries to sell you upgrades and I for one would rather die than give them a penny.

And worst of all, you can’t organically find anything anymore. Like, at all. The (admittedly well curated) Staff Picks has partnered with the European Film Academy, and now seemingly they’re the only videos that you can stumble across. Trying to get to the old landing page now takes you straight to the EFA website, and searching just gets you posts or articles, not even videos. I like a curated selection of films as much as the next person, but sometimes I just wanna see it all! In an age of algorithms deciding what they think I want to watch, there’s a purity in just being shown everything and left to your own devices – a purity I miss! 

There was a real sense of a community on Vimeo as well. More niche than Youtube, you felt like part of  a weird club, and stumbling from one filmmaker to another really amplified this. Going down the Vimeo rabbit hole meant you could find and connect with interesting people making interesting work. Now it’s direct link or nothing basically. You literally can’t click on a user’s profile to see what else they’ve uploaded. It’s bad enough as a short film curator/enthusiast, but for filmmakers looking to share their work and hopefully get noticed, it must suck even more.

Apparently a lot of the reasons its so bad (in the UK/EU at least) is because of GDPR regulations. I guess they were doing something funny with people’s data, and instead of working to fix that, they just threw the whole thing away. It feels shortsighted and just kind of stupid? But hey, I’m not a businessperson.

I could go on. Maybe they’ll bring everything back and this entire rant will be for nothing. Maybe a new fun video hosting service will come up to replace it. Maybe no one else cares. Whatever happens, it was good while it lasted, and I’m glad I made such a big short film spreadsheet while I could.