Hmm, two posts referencing New York Times columnist David Pogue in a week. But a recent article really cut me to the quick.
Pogue asks the question, “Why do I film every vacation, every school year highlight, every birthday party?” The question comes in response to a reader who simply can’t stand home movies. In a Pogue column he asked David the question, “What makes you think you’ll have any grandchildren with the time and inclination to sit through more than a few minutes of your home videos?” Fair enough.
As a parent and professional who has devoted 30 years to video storytelling and the last 13 to capturing the adventure of being a parent, I have to admit that I feel compelled to document the family. I am not sure why. OK, that is not entirely true. I think I know why. Pogue postulates that we do it for five reasons. For our older selves, for our descendants, for pleasure, for historians and for posterity. I completely agree with his list, even if it feels rather noble and lofty. But I think I frame this issue with a perspective on where do we go forward, as opposed to what do we do with all the video flotsam washing up under our beds and in our closets?
As it has been often noted, life is lived in the moments between memorable events. Too many of the videos we shoot are of birthdays, Christmas, Hanukah or Labor Day barbeques. My favorite moments on tape are not of these milestones, but of the family dinner, the kids splashing in the inflatable pool, the living room forts or the backyard baseball games. These are the parts of a life well lived that are too often forgotten. When I see my kids from 10 years ago I remember fondly what a blessing and a blast it was to parent these little guys.
Pogue’s reader comes down pretty hard on people who create home movies. He writes, “The movies an uncle shot of me and my siblings a few decades ago were projected for about 30 minutes a decade ago, and have not been looked at again by anybody… I just question whether the people amassing them [home movies] at great length have much idea of what they require of the people in them, or who inherit them.” To be blunt, I am guessing this guy does not form the sort of connections to the past that many of us treasure. I would be all over watching film of me with my siblings. If for no other reason than to mock my hair and ridicule our fashion choices.
I shoot to edit. I can’t imagine forcing someone to sit through most of the crap I capture. There is great satisfaction distilling the emotions of a moment into a brief (and I emphasize the word brief) little movie. We shoot every day events, heck, we even shoot vacations. Sure the audience is limited to my wife, four kids, and perhaps a relative or two. But creating these movies creates a new shared experience.
The larger problem is the too few tools we currently have to easily share video the way we do digital photos. This is changing with the advent of file based cameras, easier software, and even the potential of using cloud computing to edit and distribute your movie. But for now, shooting, editing and distributing your home movie is unnecessarily cumbersome. For me, even if I do it all on the web, I am guessing my audience will be no larger than 4 kids, a spouse and a grandmother. The only difference between now and 30 years ago is now we’ll be able to watch on our own terms, not trapped in a darkened living room wondering when the awful home movie will be done.
This example may shed a little insight into the way my family and I shoot and revisit our vacations. On our last trip to Hong Kong each of the kids chose two topics to report on during the holiday. This one is on the Star Ferry, and my daughter Kyra did one on shopping and Kat did one on history. Figuring out how to share our family’s content with family has led me to look at social networking solutions. I am guessing in the future how we share what we create will land somewhere between blogging, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo and feed aggregators. Oh wait, that sounds an awful lot like WindowsLive.
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