Guide
What Is a Video Diary? A Short History, from BBC Camcorders to Your Phone
A video diary is a private, recurring recording of your own life, made for yourself. The idea is older than YouTube — it started with the BBC handing camcorders to the public in 1990.
What's in this article
A video diary is a series of short recordings of yourself, made regularly, about your own life, and kept mainly for yourself. It's a diary in the ordinary sense — dated, repeated, personal — with a camera instead of a pen. People use "video diary" and "video journal" interchangeably; I do too.
Three things separate it from other video of yourself:
- It's recurring. One clip is a video. A diary is the sequence.
- You're the subject and the camera operator. Nobody is interviewing you.
- The audience is you, later. That's the difference from a vlog, and it changes what you say.
The format is older than the phone in your pocket and older than YouTube. Its history explains a lot about why it works the way it does.
1990: the BBC hands the public a camcorder
The idea of ordinary people filming their own lives for broadcast came out of the BBC's Community Programme Unit, which had made access television since the 1970s. In 1990, producer Jeremy Gibson created Video Diaries: members of the public with a story to tell were given basic video training and a domestic camcorder, left to film their own material, then supported through the edit.
The results were fifty-minute films, as Carol Nahra described in a 1999 piece for Documentary — first-person documentaries shot by the person living them. It was possible because camcorders had just become cheap and good enough for a non-professional to use, and it established the core idea: the person on camera is also the one deciding what gets filmed.
1993: Video Nation, and the two-minute entry
The more direct ancestor of a daily video diary came three years later. Video Nation, developed at the same unit by Jeremy Gibson and Tony Steyger, was explicitly modelled on Mass-Observation, the 1930s–40s project that asked ordinary Britons to keep written diaries of everyday life. Steyger's pitch was "an anthropology of everyday life."
The design, from Nahra's account:
- Around fifty people a year were chosen from across the UK and given one day of camcorder training.
- They filmed their own lives for a year — relationships, housework, children, whatever they chose — and kept editorial control, including a veto over anything broadcast.
- The output was mostly shorts of about two minutes, around 200 a year, shown on BBC Two on weeknights. Producer Chris Mohr remembered the early reaction: "people said 'what is this terribly short thing?'"
By 1999 the project had collected more than 10,000 hours of tape. BBC Two stopped commissioning the series in 2000; it continued online and closed in 2011, when the BBC cut its online budget.
Two of its decisions still hold up as advice for anyone starting a diary today. Short beats long — the two-minute format was a surprise at the time and turned out to be the part people remembered. And the ordinary is the material. Video Nation wasn't looking for dramatic stories; housework was a theme.
The longer view: the Up series
Video Nation filmed ordinary days. The other strand of the format is about filming the same person across years.
Seven Up! began in 1964 as a Granada Television documentary about fourteen British seven-year-olds from different backgrounds. Michael Apted, a researcher on the first film, directed every return visit after it, one every seven years, through 63 Up in 2019. Apted died in 2021.
The Up films aren't diaries — someone else holds the camera and asks the questions. But they're the clearest demonstration of what a long-running recording of one life does that memory can't: put the same person, asked similar questions, side by side across decades. That side-by-side is the main reason I think a personal video diary is worth keeping, and it's the argument for keeping one in more detail.
Video diaries as a research method
Researchers adopted the format for a different reason: it lets people show their lives on their own terms, without an interviewer in the room.
In 2000, Michael Rich and colleagues described Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment in the Journal of Adolescent Health: young people with asthma were given camcorders to record their daily lives, families and personal reflections, and the footage was analysed alongside interviews and questionnaires. In their pilot, the recordings surfaced environmental triggers and problems with taking medication that clinicians hadn't picked up.
A 2009 methods paper by Buchwald, Schantz-Laursen and Delmar in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods made the case for video diaries in research with children, noting they could elicit data other methods wouldn't — and that video diary studies were still not particularly widespread.
2005 onwards: video diary vs. vlog
YouTube's first video, "Me at the zoo," went up on 23 April 2005: nineteen seconds of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo. It is, more or less, a video diary entry — a person, a place, a few seconds of commentary — published to everyone.
That last part is what turned the video diary into the vlog. The format is similar, but the audience changes everything about it:
| Video diary | Vlog | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | You, later | Strangers, now |
| Edited | Rarely | Almost always |
| Retakes | Better without | Normal |
| What it's for | A record | An audience |
| Where it lives | Your phone, ideally | A platform |
The other line from that era pulls back toward privacy. In 2012, Cesar Kuriyama gave a TED talk about recording one second of every day of his thirtieth year, partly because he felt he couldn't remember the day-to-day of his twenties. The compilation went viral, and became an app. It's the same idea as Video Nation compressed as far as it goes: if the entry is short enough, you'll actually make it.
What a video diary looks like now
The camcorder problem is solved — everyone has a camera. The problems that remain are the ones Video Nation's producers would recognise:
- Keeping it going. A diary only works as a sequence, and most stop in the second week. This guide is about getting past that.
- Knowing what to say. "Film your life" is too open. A question helps, which is why these prompts exist, and why there's a list of video diary ideas sorted by how much time each takes.
- Privacy. Video Nation gave contributors a veto. A diary on a phone deserves the same: if the clips upload to a cloud you don't control, it isn't quite a diary any more.
FAQ
What is a video diary?
A video diary is a series of short, regular recordings of yourself talking about your own life, made mainly for yourself to watch later. It works like a written diary, with a camera instead of a pen.
What's the difference between a video diary and a vlog?
The audience. A video diary is private and kept as a record for your future self; a vlog is made for other people, usually edited, and published on a platform. That changes what you say and how honestly you say it.
Is a video diary the same as a video journal?
Yes. The two terms are used interchangeably. Some people use 'journal' for entries with a reflective or goal-focused purpose, but there's no settled distinction.
Where did video diaries come from?
The format as we know it started with the BBC. Its Community Programme Unit launched Video Diaries in 1990, giving members of the public camcorders to film their own stories, and Video Nation in 1993, which collected short self-shot clips of everyday life for broadcast.
Sources
- Nahra, C. (1999). Video Nation and Britain's camcorder citizens. Documentary, International Documentary Association.
- Video Diaries and Video Nation. Wikipedia. Used for production credits and dates; the Video Diaries entry is uncited, so details are cross-checked against Nahra (1999).
- BBC News (2011, 24 January). BBC to cut online budget by 25%.
- Up (film series). Wikipedia.
- Rich, M., Lamola, S., Gordon, J., & Chalfen, R. (2000). Video intervention/prevention assessment: A patient-centered methodology for understanding the adolescent illness experience. Journal of Adolescent Health, 27, 155–165.
- Buchwald, D., Schantz-Laursen, B., & Delmar, C. (2009). Video diary data collection in research with children: An alternative method. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 12–20.
- Kuriyama, C. (2012). One second every day. TED2012.
- Me at the zoo. Wikipedia.