I'll repost an earlier reply about my own experiments with a camcorder:
I did the same thing with a video camera. For those of us who get weird responses from other people and have no clue why, it can be an incredibly interesting thing to actually look at ourselves from the outside.
We won't be seeing what other people see, because what other people see is filtered through their perceptions and not ours. But we will at least be seeing the same data other people get visually.
Here is what I wrote down by the way (everything in the entire post past this point dates from 9/17/2004, and is over a relatively limited set of actions -- for instance I do turn out to have more facial expressions in different situations, etc.). I've only edited a few words so people know what some usage of "it" means and things like that:
I thought it would be interesting to see what I look like from the outside. Which is something I'm extremely bad at noticing. So I set the camcorder up pointed at me while I was using the computer for awhile, and then also in a couple positions that showed the whole room when I was doing other stuff. I should note that this is kind of an interesting scientific-like experiment for me, not something I'm particularly worked up over.
Some observations so far -- and I did this on a fairly sedentary/non-stimmy day (I have basically two resting modes -- stimmy and statue):
1. When I am sitting still, I sit much stiller than most people do. You can look at it normal speed or fastforward and there's no change in position.
2. When I am sitting still and move, I only move the part of me I have told to move. Other parts of me do not move. For instance, while on the computer, my whole body is rigid except for my fingers and/or hands, and they only move the minimal amount they need in order to get the job done. In other words, like a statue with a couple of temporarily-and-minimally-moving parts.
3. When I am walking, if I do not consciously do something about it my hands and fingers just kind of dangle off my wrists, and as soon as I stop thinking consciously about it they revert to that. (I only consciously did anything as an experiment since I could see myself in the LCD screen.)
4. I quite frequently bend over and show my buttcrack, and my shirt rides up my back a lot.
5. I have very little facial expression. Even when I think I am showing a normal amount of facial expression, it only changes in very minor ways on my face if it changes at all. If I force a big facial expression, even my best tries look quite fake. Except that while cleaning up something smelly, my face made a very strange expression on its own. I want to videotape myself now in situations that will be more likely to provoke facial expressions.
6. The way I move does not look at all like the way other people move. I actually tried, just for the heck of it, trying to walk across the room like a "normal person". I was taught this very extensively by doctors who thought autistic people on neuroleptics should not walk like autistic people on neuroleptics. I still moved very strangely. I had no idea I moved that strangely. (I don't mind, I just had no idea.)
7. My breasts are larger than I expected.
8. My cat sometimes tries very hard to get my attention when I am focused on something, fails, gets extremely irritated with me, and takes more drastic measures. She also finds camcorders very interesting. (That one was a shock -- I saw her patiently sitting beside me with me giving no acknowledgement at all that I'd noticed her, and then her having to bop me with her head and stand on my leg to get my attention. Then she got curious about the camcorder and went over and looked at it before coming back to lead me to her food bowl. But she had this kind of resigned exasperated look before she touched me.)
9. I rock at different speeds and rhythms at different times.
10. In general I physically move much less than I feel like I'm moving. It's as if for the movement to show up on the outside I have to try twice as hard as I'd expect to have to.
11. I get into some very unusual postures trying to do very ordinary things.
I can at least now see what people mean when they say I can't pass. I just took their word for it, but if I saw me on the street, yeah, I'd think that person was different in some way.
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams