Multi-view postcards with blunt, auto-generated captions from YouTube remove the traditional notion of authorship. These captions, derived from what the narrator seems to say during walking tours of UK seaside locations, offer an unfiltered, often brutally honest perspective. This immediacy conveys a more contemporary and authentic truth about each place, something that professionally composed and upscaled images may fail to capture for a remote audience.
The first set of postcards features St Leonards, East Sussex, and London, spanning 100 years of history. Additionally, I've processed a tour of Morecambe from a different v-logger, which you can see at the end of this page. By using auto-captions (from YouTube’s subtitle settings), a new narrative emerges, creating a contemporary postcard with realistic photography sourced from citizen reportage.
A new narrative unfolds when auto-captions from YouTube's subtitle settings are used to create contemporary postcards. These captions, paired with realistic photography sourced from citizen-reportage videos, offer an unfiltered view of seaside towns. Unlike the idyllic, "chocolate box" images that often present a sanitized version of these places, this technique captures them in their raw, evolving state—ironic and sometimes brutal. The tinted versions add a layer of gravitas, providing a nostalgic touch for those who appreciate that style.
Hastings:
Fake nostalgia benefits from auto-generated captions translating the audio track from the POV of a vlogger eyes, on a visit captured in 2024, remixed by myself into postcards, to be fed back into an interactive video experience
Morecambe
Running the instant grabs through filters to size them into 5x7 dimensions with borders and now the captions appear more like titles. My vintage postcards collection often repeats one thrase over many themes, now the text is generated by randomly hitting the spacebar to make screen grabs, and the narrator's audio provides the words - these are from a video of Morecambe in August 2024.
This helps me continue the vintage style of a photographer giving an everyday scene a title, except now these subtitles are automatically created from their narrator's audio when viewing with closed captions/subtitles. The reduced direction I experience when passively viewing and making screen grabs with their unexpected texts is sometimes more realistic, the stark contemporary descriptions and mundane scenes are in keeping with the classic British seaside postcard genre.