People filming themselves in nature
A lot of hiking, camping, and cycling youtube video makers choose to film third-person footage of themselves alone in nature... sometimes with a drone, but sometimes with laborious, manual camera placement.
Nearly every Youtuber who works in this space will sometimes put a camera down beside a path, walk out of sight, then walk back across the camera's field of view, to create the kind of "subject in motion" shot that professionally-produced video footage usually acquires with a team of camera operators.
This kind of shot is so natural in video storytelling, such a common part of all the filmed fiction and professionally-produced nonfiction that we watch, that it's possible to just ignore how artificial they can feel in nature and sports videos produced by solo creators. These videos are often about the joy of being alone in nature. They have a diaristic quality, and they're full of footage filmed with a camera in the hands. But the third-person footage implies the presence of a team filming the subject, which only reminds you that there's no team, which in turn just reminds you, every time, that the Youtuber walked up to the camera spot, set it up there, walked back down the hill, then re-walked this path, possibly multiple times, in order to capture the perfect shot of themselves alone in nature.
I'm sure some people find it easy to ignore the process, but every time I see a third-person shot of a guy in motion in a solo biking video, I'm doing the Leo-pointing meme. This chump biked the same path twice to impress me!! And I'm not even impressed!!!
I recently watched the video below - of a guy using a very small airplane to go camping alone in nature, in places inaccessible to almost everyone but a guy in a fucking airplane. My favorite moment in the video is very early on, when he films himself landing on a small island in the fucking airplane, revealing that he actually landed on the island already, set up the camera, then filmed himself landing again in order to get the Youtube shot.
The whole video is full of these moments, and because he's alone in nature, in a goddamn airplane, he has to be very frank about the fact that he's taking off and landing his Super Cub multiple times. He'll sometimes even be honest about which takeoff and landing the footage is from, and at the end of the video he even addresses the annoyance of having to do this directly, by showing what his run-back to the camera down the "runway" of a mountainside actually looked like.
I found this video fascinating for its frank engagement with how the footage was filmed. The stuff he's doing is crazy aspirational plane-nerd nature lifestyle shit, stuff that is just absolutely Youtube bait, but it has to speak very frankly about the filming process in a way that I found fun and silly. When you start thinking about how many times he has to film himself taking off and landing an entire fucking airplane in order to get the shot for Youtube, it just starts you thinking about how much else might be out of frame in a video like this. Pit stops for fuel? Entire islands he scouted that he didn't show in the video? Shit he did to prepare and plan and review his footage? It can be a lot of fun to speculate about how someone filmed something on youtube, particularly with nature and travel content like cycling (and I guess planes), so I had a lot of fun with this one.