Seriously, is this just some elaborate practical joke? Are Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen deliberately trying to convince the world that they’re such bumbling nincompoops that they shouldn’t be trusted with $15 much less $15000 a month to make a documentary? Or are they really this incompetent?
I’m leaning towards the latter interpretation.
Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. It’s their latest official update video for their backers on Patreon, to let the people who collectively sent them $9000 last month and another $7000 this month know what’s the SarkeesianEffect duo have managed to accomplish with their money so far.
And it’s filmed on a cheap webcam with bad lighting. Apparently these guys can’t be bothered to spend ten minutes to set up the equipment that their donors have so generously provided for them in order to make a video that looks even vaguely professional.
Even more hilariously, they filmed the whole thing using a directional microphone that 1) makes Jordan Owen sound like he’s fallen down a well and 2) RENDERS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR WHAT DAVIS AURINI IS SAYING ALTOGETHER.
You don’t have to watch the whole thing to see what I mean — skip ahead to about 1:15 in the video and wait until Aurini starts talking. He manages to get in a couple of words before moving out of the microphone’s range, and from then on nothing he says is audible (unless you want to blast your speakers out every time Owen talks).
In other words, not only can these two not be trusted to make a professional quality documentary, they can’t even manage to make a crappy webcam video properly.
Had their bete noire Anita Sarkeesian put out a similarly shitty video in order to tell her supporters what she was doing with their money, she would have been run out of town on a rail. Possibly literally.
In the comments on YouTube, Owen tells his disappointed backers that he can’t upload another video to replace this obviously fucked up one because that would trigger something on Patreon and cause all their backers to get charged again.
Uh, dude, you can’t upload an improved video with a different title, or on Aurini’s channel?
Huh. Maybe you should have, you know, watched your own video once to make sure everything was ok with it before putting it up in the first place?
I swear, these guys must have thought that Tim Burton’s movie about Ed Wood was a how-to, not a comedy.
Whats a contact high?
Sometimes if you’re in a room or car full of marijuana smoke, you’ll start to feel the effects even if you aren’t smoking just from breathing in the smoke.
Oof. That was quite a run on sentence. Don’t judge me. I’m tired!
You can’t hear what he’s saying … and you consider this a bad thing?
Oh ok. Isn’t that just ‘being high’? =)
Do aurini and owen even like each other? The more I see the more I’m inclined to think they’re only ‘working’ together because no one else would. There seems to be real disdain, especially on owens’ part. It’s just all so peculiar.
I’ve heard “douche chills” but personally I prefer the German term “Fremdscham.”
Has the video at the top of the post changed? Now it seems to be butthurt over her tweets about the latest school shooting.
It’s funny how if a group of muslim people do something awful that’s an example of how all muslim people are evil and terrible, but if it’s pointed out how men and boys perpetrate most school shootings that’s completely out of line and full of misandry.
Well its not funny.
I wonder if they took it down. It was #1/100 earlier.
Got their feelings hurt?
They must have taken it down. The most recent video now up was posted 10/25.
HOWEVER. While browsing around for it, I uncovered this GEM.
It’s a response to the video that Philip Rose linked in the comments to an earlier entry about Beavis and Butthead’s technical acumen.
My favorite part is how Owen highlights Rose’s first cut (you know, like how all vloggers who aren’t shit do in order to cut out all the ums and giggles) as being “obvious,” but then when he inserts text cards to critique Rose’s critique, he fucks it up by not cutting directly onto Rose’s cuts. He lets a few frames of the next bit play before cutting in for his text card.
I mean, shit, he couldn’t even take a few seconds to make sure he’s cutting the video in the right spot. What we are seeing is not care and talent, but lazy “that’s close enough!” bullshit.
It looks like absolute ass. I could do (and have done) better with Windows Movie Maker and about 30 seconds of time per cut to make sure I was hitting the correct frame.
So, while whinging about how someone called him out for having no technical ability, Owen proceeds to demonstrate that he still has no technical ability.
Ok, in addition to The Sarkeesian Effect with Aurini, Jordan Owen has a Patreon page of his own. He has 2 donors for $4 total per video. Why were they bitching that $9000 per month wasn’t enough to reach their vision? It sounds like a massive amount of indulgence compared to his previous work.
@Shalimar, because they have neither morals nor shame, of course.
Well the video is down, maybe because of the audio. The one up now is his complete (willful?) misunderstanding of her tweets regarding the shooting.
Also, looking through Patreon, Owen says he can’t upload a replacement because it would charge their donors again. Which makes sense, the donors are paying per video update, not per month. It is per month because Davis/Aurini have promised to only upload one video a month.
The problem with this is that Owen himself uploaded a free video to the Patreon page on August 27th to explain the project in it’s early days. At that point, they already had $2700 in donations and those donors weren’t charged for the introductory video.
In other words, it seems that Owen knows how to upload a corrected version without charging his backers, he just doesn’t feel bothered to make one.
Somebody needs to tell them “invisible” cuts aren’t the be all end all of filmmaking since at least the 1920s. Maybe hand them copies of “Black God, White Devil” and “Battleship Potemkin”.
In fact, I’d hand him the first movie just to see him complain about the title.
I predict that within the next few days we’ll get a 30 min video defending shitting one’s pants.
@vaiyt
I KNOW. And if he hates “visible” cuts so much, it would have been piss easy to make some invisible cuts of his own by just choosing more carefully which frame to cut for his text.
Well, piss easy for anyone who actually cares about what goes up on youtube. Owen has proven over and over that he doesn’t.
“In the comments on YouTube, Owen tells his disappointed backers that he can’t upload another video to replace this obviously fucked up one because that would trigger something on Patreon and cause all their backers to get charged again.”
Having a patreon, I already know of a very simple way around this
Do not check the “charge patrons for this” box.
Of course, if he is, like SEEMS to be the case, charging on a monthly basis rather than a per-video basis, then there is no problem whatsoever, other than, you know, not giving a single crap about quality
I really wish I had the time to help these guys out by close captioning their video. I work in accessibility, so it could be awesome.
(Video depicts) Intelligible muttering, with angry faces visible.
(Video depicts) Man attempting to light an e-cig with a zippo.
(Video depicts) Amusing Lavey impersonator attempting to tell joke, sotto voice.
And so forth…
In the first video that’s now up where they whine about her tweets, I was especially amused about what they said about the Gender Knot book… Because it’s not like the publishers send the book out to well known people with the intent that they’ll write recommendations. It’s doubtful they even know each other. She’s just a decently known feminist, and well… maybe she recommended it because she’d read it and liked it? Do they think everybody who has quotes on a book jacket has the author in their pocket?
I was feeling pretty bad about my life tonight, and then I remembered Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini. And now I feel much better, if only because, by comparison, I’m pretty successful at what I do.
Reviews, PR, the publishing process in general – how do these arcane mysteries work? Probably something to do with evil feminists trying to destroy Western civilization via witchcraft again.
Um, did this link get hijacked? It led to the intended video this morning, and now leads to some ridiculous propaganda. I don’t think that’s on purpose? Mods?
Hello David, thank you for providing me with current updates on the Gamergate debacle. I visited this blog before, but I would often reassure myself that the MRA’s are just an american thing. With Gamergate this seems to be different. On different german speaking forums I found many users that agree with gamergate and no doubt engage in harrassing, when they log into their english accounts. Many articles seem to place gamergate into an american context, but videogames as a medium have reached a global audience. Some people have the expectation that american law enforcement will eventually capture and prosecute the people who made the death threats, but if they live outside the US it will be next to impossible to bring them to justice. It is a weird situation, because as long as this harrasment keeps confined to the “Anglo” parts of the Internet, there seems no urgency for our press to tackle misogyny at home (because they frame it as stuff that happens over there). How can you change global culture, when most of its participants have dual internet citizenship, where they can engage in destructive behavior in english and then go back to their local networks and act like normal people?