Have you ever seen yourself on video?

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A friend videotaped me answering some questions about photography recently and when I looked at the tape, I was surprised by what I actually looked like. I found I looked kinda posey, tilting my head to the side a lot, plus whenever I was asked a question, my eyes would tilt up and blink a lot. I thought at first that it was just that I was nervous, but when I mentioned to my husband, he told me that's what I'm like. He said my random poses and expressions were what attracted him to me.

It's odd how much of yourself you don't see unless you actually tape yourself and see yourself as other's see you. I was a bit shocked at first, but I can't be anyone else. I can't stop my expressions, rapid blinking and little poses, plus I gesture a lot with my hands. Whenever I think of explaining something that I can see in my mind, I feel my way through describing it with my hands.


Anyone else had this experience of thinking you came across differently than what you actually do?

I took a broadcasting class in a private school that I was in briefly where we did mock news casts on camera and then showed them for the first time to all of the other high school kids in the school (it was about 50 people). I was bad, I looked awful, and sounded awful. It was a nightmare.

if i don't move a lot and don't talk, i like watching myself

but talking, i find embarrassing the way i move my lips and i move my body too much when talking. i move my upper limbs and body to help to express my thoughts.

i was always doing that, i remember one teacher making fun of me because of that at school.

Yeah had this in school, We had to do this drama thing and were on camera and when I saw myself I was horified, I looked, sounded and acted differently then I thought. My voice was quite deep and not much feeling, I barely made any body movements when I was suposed to move my arms and things and I thought that it was kind of like I was realy wierd and a kind of boreing. I tried to tell others how I apeard differently then I thought and they couldnt understand, obviously I must be like that all of the time. I think after that I decided to move my arms and stuff after I did some public speaking, but I still think that I come off as weird. I always get embaresed by watching myself but it also gives me some ideas of how I should act, like if I do some things differently I can appear less confusing.

It's odd to see myself on video-tape, I'm not like how I expected.

I was surprised by how much friendlier I look, than I thought I would.

I found myself quite engaging to watch.

Made me aware of some things I do that I didn't realise - not bad things, just things.

I always look goofy!

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

How I look on videotape? My eyes are uneven and I walk like I'm going to fall down at any minute. I seem limp.

I try to avoid being taped, as if I don't really look like that, but it is some function of the video recorder itself. When I know I'm being taped, I think I overcorrect and my movements are really exaggerated.

I don't watch myself on tape except under controlled settings, it's too depressing.

I also noticed when I was younger I always held my arms tightly against my chest and had some early twitches. Kind of interesting. The best videos are of me when I was a baby. Really interesting to analyse my OWN development!

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

Argh, I hate looking at myself on video.

The one thing I notice first is my voice. DO I SOUND LIKE THAT!?!?

Yeah. It sounds so different when you hear it recorded than when you're listening to yourself talk.

I've only seen myself on video when somebody videotaped school or church musicals. I seem a bit stiff and formal, especially when singing (I sing very correctly, with no embellishments), but weirdly enough I talk more naturally than most of the others, though it's still formal. I assume that is because I am always reciting lines, even in everyday life, so I have a great deal more practice.

I don't really like watching myself, though. I wouldn't really like having to videotape myself.

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.

I love how my voice sounds on a tape recorder, but my posture in video is a nightmare. The first time I saw myself in video was about three years ago, at a funeral service. We all were supposed to be standing still, but I was so stiff I looked like a bodyguard. I walked as a nutcracker soldier toy, and my fingers kept self-stimming all the time. It was creepy.

I hate being in videos but the recent videos that I was in I hated, not because of how I was, but because of being so overweight (not so bad now, but like a year ago, man...) But I saw a video of myself at 11 and my gosh, I was embarrassed to watch it. I jumped up and down holding a babydoll and all I talked about was the babydoll... UGH!!

I've seen enough videos of myself (usually from family recordings with digicams) that I've grown pretty used to seeing myself, and I don't really find anything strange in it, except maybe that I tend to be more still than I'm aware.

But my voice never ceases to surprise me; it sounds so high-pitched, much more than I already think it is.