Skift Take

Capturing the dailyness of city life, especially street life, is an art that's surely underexploited. These videos show some ways it could be done.

With the advent of digital, city marketing videos of late have become all about the timelapse, a blur of tilt-shifts and skylines. They are surely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo friendly, and an easy (way out?) to ensure virality and shares in these platforms. But after a certain point, watch 10 of these, and they all start looking the same.

But what about dailyness of the city, how do you show that in these videos? Capturing street life is an underexploited marketing tool that requires a more nuanced understanding of the rhythms of the city life. This becomes more important especially as travelers are increasingly asking for deeper and more authentic experiences from their travels.

One Vimeo channel (collection of videos) called “Cities in Motion” has plenty of good examples of how it could be done.

We selected what we consider are 10 great examples of these city-life videos. Some of them are purely slow city-life videos, some of them a mix of minimal time-lapse and street life slices. All of them have a mix of right shots, right tones and right soundtrack overlays.

Which one if your favorite out of these?

Testing the 5D MARK III Raw 14 bites – Marrakesh, Morocco from Abderrafia Elabdioui on Vimeo.

 

DAWN TO DARK – Life around the Ganges from David Fiene on Vimeo.

 

Rain in Marseille / CANON 6D RAW from Alex Soloviev on Vimeo.

 

Love Madrid from The Film Artist on Vimeo.

 

Istanbul from Christoph Beeler on Vimeo.

 

ROME. from Jeremy Janin on Vimeo.

 

Moments – Old Cairo [240fps] from Gunther Machu on Vimeo.

 

Times Like This from Sertac Yuksel on Vimeo.

 

Here is St. Louis from Grain Inc. on Vimeo.

 

New York – A cinematic portrait from luismonteiro on Vimeo.

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Tags: cities, marketing, videos

Photo credit: The dailyness of Marrakesh. Video screen capture.

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