In My Slow Content Era

Content creation. It almost feels like a dirty phrase nowadays. As though being a content creator somehow makes you less of an artist.

I started my YouTube channel circa 2018. You could say that was the beginning of my journey as a content creator or, specifically, a video-based content creator, and the process wasn’t a smooth one for me. There were a lot of learning curves, from the technical aspect of video creation to understanding how to articulate my ideas and present my work in a way that might retain attention and garner subscribers.

Back in 2018, long-form content was standard across YouTube. YouTube rewards creators with more monetisation options if a video is longer than 8 minutes, and so, naturally, they also enhance the reach of your content if it hits that mark and then qualifies for more opportunities for them to monetise it.

I spent countless hours learning how to create longer videos and finally felt as though I was getting the hang of it when TikTok reared its head, just a couple of years after starting YouTube. Suddenly, there was a shift from having as long as you desired to discuss a topic to needing to summarise it all in under 60 seconds.

I tend to jump on trends late because I don’t believe they’re going to stick. Unfortunately for me, TikTok was one of those trends I was very much in denial about. I had no idea how prominent short-form videos would become in the landscape of social media and content creation and my stubbornness allowed me to push it to the back of my mind and pretend as though the short-form wave wasn’t really happening.

Of course, I eventually had to cave.

Learning to tame the beast of short-form content was an inevitability. Brain rot was taking over. Before I knew it, I was playing back 60-second videos at double speed, and so was the rest of the world.

In all honesty, I don’t think that having to understand short-form video content was a bad thing. There’s a lesson in storytelling where summarising quickly and holding people’s attention instantly is concerned, and it’s one that I’ve tried for the past few years to grasp a better understanding of. I’ve been playing a balancing act of creating both long and short-form content, repurposing long-form videos into smaller, bite-sized pieces of information, and creating standalone concepts that are best suited to short-form content, alongside my usual, 8-minute-or-longer, weekly videos.

It’s been a journey of bettering my skills as a storyteller, as a curator and as an editor. More recently, however, I’ve become more interested in something that I like to think of as “slow” content.

Slow content is quite the opposite of short-form content. It doesn’t include snappy hooks or quick cuts, but instead focuses on drawn-out clips, organised at a more relaxing pace.

Take, for example, a video I made during my time in New York earlier this year.

The video consists of 21 minutes of photos and videos that I took on my trip. There’s no talking head, there’s no articulation of my thoughts at all, it’s just pure imagery, set to carefully selected music and sound design.

It’s one of my favourite videos that I’ve released this year (and, at the point of writing this, I’ve released 17 long-form videos in 2025, so there’s competition). So much, that I’m currently working on a sequel for the video, but set in London (my hometown).

My most recent video is half an hour long. It’s a video documenting my day in the darkroom, printing from colour film negatives. By nature, a video about darkroom printing should be a lengthy one. Printing is a meticulous process that requires time, patience and lots of adjustment. It took me the first three hours of the day to produce one print during this darkroom session, and so I wanted the video to reflect that sentiment (without it actually being eight hours long, of course).

I know that there’s a time and place for different types of content. I won’t be releasing slow content every week. Not only is it unlikely that my audience will want to watch that, but I simply don’t have the time to produce such long content every week. Alas, I’m enjoying this type of content at the moment. I’m enjoying trying to repair my attention span (thanks, TikTok), and I hope that this longer, more thought-out but less edited content will resonate with others, too.