Amateurs’ talent: Giving us a local perspective on the world

THE man in the video is doing some sort of quirky dance in a foreign land, arms flailing and flopping, feet moving as if walking over hot coals. There is nothing graceful or beautiful about the dance. Nonetheless it communicates an infectious joy that defies easy characterization. In short, it is fun to watch.

“It’s just something I’ve always done,” said Matt Harding, who created and stars in the video. “It’s that dance that kids do when they’re 2 or 3 years old.

“I guess I just never stopped doing that,” he said.

The nearly four-minute-long video is so captivating that it has been seen online by more than 3 million viewers since it was released two months ago. More than 2.2 million of those folks saw it on YouTube.com, the largest and most popular website for sharing and watching original video content.

Since YouTube was launched just a year and a half ago, it has become the 16th-most-popular website in the world, according to Alexa, a website ranking service. One hundred million videos a day are watched on YouTube, according to the website. By comparison, about 26 million viewers watched the four major networks during prime time on a recent Monday night. The wide availability of broadband Internet connections has provided amateur and professional travel filmmakers with a new medium for the distribution of their work, providing works such as quirky personal videos or hotel promotional spots. The growth in broadband, which hit 102 million U.S. users in May, is up 30% from a year earlier, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Harding, 29, of Seattle, has achieved a kind of fame once reserved for the stars of traditional media. His first dancing travel video, released in early 2005, was such a hit that he was approached last August by a chewing gum company that wanted to sponsor his next film.

“I had assumed when I made it, it would be amusing to my friends and family, and it was amusing to me,” Harding said. “People who have no idea who I am found it a lot more intriguing than my friends and family.”

Using his sponsor’s money, he embarked on a six-month trip to 39 countries on all seven continents, dancing on video in each place. The video can be found at his website www.wherethehellismatt.com.

There are nearly 150,000 videos tagged as “travel” on YouTube. Because filmmakers decide what tags to give their own videos, many only marginally qualify as travel and the quality of the films varies greatly.

Another website specializing in travel videos is TurnHere.com. It employs professional, local filmmakers to shoot short video travel guides. The site has 150 films online covering neighborhoods mostly in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, but with some coverage for destinations in 15 countries. It plans to have 25,000 videos online in the next 12 months, said Brad Inman, founder and chief executive. The videos offer something for travelers and locals alike who are looking for ideas about things to do and places to go.

“These are not video tours,” Inman said. Because the filmmakers are residents of the places, the videos provide a local’s perspective. “It’s a powerful way to give travelers a unique insight about a place before they get there but also to feel comfortable about these places as well.”

Robert Sobul, 38, has made more than a dozen films about Los Angeles for the website. This lifetime resident of L.A., currently of Silver Lake, is a mostly self-taught, one-man filmmaker. He conceptualizes, shoots and edits the films himself.

To narrate the films, Sobul taps local authors, rock stars and even a stuffed duck named Quacker, featured in a film about Hollywood and Highland. Quacker is perhaps an acquired taste, but Sobul says he is very popular.

“I’m always interested to find a new twist

The films on TurnHere are very slick, professional productions done in a quick-cut, documentary style. They run four or five minutes.

The challenge for video websites is finding a way to make money. YouTube carries ads on its Web pages. TurnHere sells ads that it also produces. They are shot in the same style as the travel videos, and it would be easy to confuse the two, except that the ads are shorter and marked “sponsored.”

InterContinental Hotels is its first big customer, and in November the chain will launch video city guides, hosted by the concierges at its 140 hotels worldwide.

Travelers “want to see a city through the lens of the hotel,” said Jennifer Ploszaj, InterContinental Hotels spokeswoman. “And who better to do that than the concierge?”

For amateur filmmakers such as Harding, the reward of posting a travel video online is in the doing. Though he benefited from the chewing gum sponsorship, he makes no effort to commercialize the film or his website.

“I think what [the chewing gum company] did with me was interesting,” he said. “They found a way to get the word out about their product.

“But for me what works about the video is, I’m not personally trying to sell anything to anyone.”

Nothing, that is, except perhaps a childlike appreciation of the joy of travel.

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 james.gilden@latimes.com