For a bit I was holding on for this message, just for the sheer novelty. But then I got sick of it and started hanging up early. It's the way it seems to be questioning your life choices. How did you end up being the only one on this web call, in an overcrowded room not set up for work, that really needs a thorough clean, especially the bits with black mould on, hmm?
You'll notice I have terrible eye drift there. My vidwindow (a little Max Headroom for you there p-p-p-p pop pickers) is a long way from my cam. What's the solution? Skype eyes:
Every time I catch my eyes flipping to little postage-stamp me I draw them back to the skype eyes. Eye contact when I'm making a point. Stare down the blank cyclops of the cam. Would they work better if they were less cartoony? Would it work better if they were Tilda Swinton's eyes?
It's weird how contemporary Max Headroom still sounds, even though it's just that dude from Orphan Black in a load of prosthetics with an MTV spot playing in the background:
While you're watching your colleagues and family and friends going full block-and-stutter, imagine that you're r-r-r-r-running some semi-wet-ops investigative journalist/sleb/social worker into a handy plot-configuration that will starkly expose the bleak dystopianism of m-m-m-m-modern life. Which, honestly, you probably are.
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In real life we don't stare fixedly into each other's faces the whole time so I have been trying to think of ways to make just lounging about like normal make sense over video.
For some work meetings I have run the video from my phone positioned to one side so if I am looking at that it at least looks more natural and if I want to turn to face the speaker the eyeline will be fairly close to natural. In a real-life desktop meeting you spend a
lot of time ear-to-ear rather than face-to-face
I'm now slightly off to one side in the web cam, and can turn to face as needed, too. It happened by accident, but I'm beginning to wonder if it was always going to end up that way.
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