Why do we make home movies?

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. 

 

Flying Fish from drewke on Vimeo.

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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Camera Tour Part 1

Episode 6 – Camera Tour Part 1 

I really try and avoid jargon. Too often I slip into the trap and hear myself sounding self-important as I toss acronyms and slang into conversation. For instance, why say LCD screen when screen will do just fine? Calling it liquid crystal or plasma isn’t going to directly affect my shooting. And numbers get displayed on a screen… for me the screen is not a display. What is the point here? Well in this episode I am starting a jargon-free tour of the common video camera.

Many of you are very familiar with your camera, so the material in today’s episode may seem obvious. For example, if you have been shooting for a while you certainly know where to find the on/off switch. But there is a huge population of folks out there that are really intimidated by all the knobs, buttons and glass on a camera. I watch my wife try and shoot with anything beyond our Flip and her anxiety ratchets up appreciatively. This video blog episode, and the next, are not really geared for the power user, although I hope everyone finds something new. They are geared for those who leave their camera in the closet or under the bed, unused and unloved. The users who have hours of unseen footage in a box. Those of you who can’t figure out why your footage is not what you expected.

My goal here is to create an invitation to those who are intimidated by the technology, the complication and the impenetrable mystique of creating personal media. My hope is to open the door to those who begin a task like editing a home movie and quit because they don’t know where to start. So in the spirit of beginning at the beginning, we start with where to find the power switch.

 

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Interviews

The process of teaching some of the finer points of personal video production can be somewhat chaotic. Where do you begin? What is helpful to one may be obvious or uninspiring to another. An important part of the task over the next few months is to build a body of content that will present a foundation in the basics of digital video. It is a lot of ground to cover.

Episode 5 – Interviews

I expect much of this content will be about how you can use your camera to tell your story. The choices you have available may seem a subtle at first but they can dramatically affect your video.

Let’s take camera height. All too often we see footage of a child taken from the adult’s point of view. We watch home movies where we see are the tops of a lot of little heads and upturned faces. When I shoot kids, or anyone for that matter, I work to set the height of the camera to be level with the eyes of the subject. That means when I am photographing someone less than six feet tall (my height) I take the camera off my shoulder and drop it to the right height. This can make a huge difference. Take a look at the power of the little girl describing peacocks in this episode’s video. She talks directly into the camera, she is full of energy, and we have a glimpse into her world. I certainly am not the first to point out that the world of a four-year-old can have the same power and insight as that of a fifty-four-year-old. Thinking about your camera position will help you to show the moment with integrity.

This episode is not about camera angles, oddly enough. It is about how you can tell a story. When we shoot home movies we usually just spray the camera around the room. Hosing down the event as if the place was on fire. We see Uncle Ed in the corner, there is Aunt Ethel at the table with her Niece, and look, there is the toddler unwrapping a gift. It is a string of random moments with little connective narrative. A great way to create home movies you will treasure for a lifetime is to interview the people in your video. Have them tell you what they are doing, how they feel, what is important about the day or the event, who they are, why they are there… I think you get the idea. This is your chance to play journalist and ask them who, what, when, where, why and how. It is not an inquisition, but their answers can give perspective to otherwise confusing footage. Besides, you will have the added benefit of using your interviews as the narrative spine of your video.

You Can Edit. Really

Editing sometimes seems like so much alchemy. Managing all the cables and software can feel overwhelming. But the learning curve for editing does not have to be steeper than the face of an isosceles triangle.

Episode 4 – You Can Edit. Really

You can, and should, edit your footage. There are a multitude of resources available to you for managing your footage. Whether you are on a PC or Mac, there are solutions that will do a great job and are already built right into your computer. While videotape is far from dead, we are seeing more and more cameras that record the image to a file, making moving and managing your video as easy as moving and editing a Word document. Finally, with the expansion of video on the internet, we will begin to see more and more web-based editing applications where you can edit and distribute your work with a minimum of muss and fuss.

But it does take practice to become familiar with the process. It is not all that difficult to do and you can have success within the first few minutes. This is especially true with the Beta build of Movie Maker. This package appears to be a few months away from release, but shows tremendous promise. I expect to spend a fair amount of time exploring it with you as they get closer to release. In the interim we have iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Premier, and many other apps.

You have to start somewhere, so dive right in. It won’t be perfect at first, but you need to start somewhere. Simply, just start editing your videos. You will see that the story you have to tell is important, and that more folks will listen as you eliminate the bumpy spots in your footage. Eventually you will learn how to add sound, organize the footage, and use basic editing techniques. But you can’t learn until you start. Find the courage to poke around the editor that is waiting for you.

 

 

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Media Notes Episode 3 – Get Up and Move

 

Episode 3 – Get Up and Move

We have all endured the excruciating home movie. You know the one… a single wide shot of “Little Johnny” or “Little Judy” running around a field playing some sort of pee-wee sport. The camera is locked on a wide shot, the kids are dots in the back ground. A proud mom or dad offers commentary about how, “there is my kid. The blue smudge over there.”

A Wild West dentist would inflict less pain than these parents. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Shot variety is a great way to propel a story or event. Wide shots should be left to the domain of surveillance footage, establishing shots and weather cameras. As photographer and story teller it is up to you to choose what is important and communicate that point of view with your camera. It is all about how you frame the shot. This episode introduces you to the notion of shot variety and camera placement. There are a number of thoughts about how you can convey emotional messages by how you position your subject in the frame, and in future episodes we’ll explore the logic and emotion behind the choices you make. For now, I just want you to start thinking about where you could be to make your shots more interesting.

It is not difficult and once you practice moving around you will find that you are placing your camera and framing your shots by intuitively knowing what is best for your story. There is no need for intimidating theories and a pile of jargon. Let’s keep it simple. Get up and move. Often closer is better. Look at the corners of your shot, is there anything distracting there? What feels right?

Shooting your home movies is not a test, it should be fun. Sure, there are times where the final outcome is not the vision you had. But that is how we learn. There are events in your family that can not be repeated and if you stop using your camera because you are afraid you will make a mistake, well that would be the real mistake.

I love shooting everyday stuff. After a while all the Christmas packages look the same, but the water fight in the back yard, the inflatable pool, bath time, dinner in a high chair… those have a special beauty in their own right. Most of life is lived in the in-between moments, not just during life’s milestones. So be certain to capture life’s little pleasures. Twenty years from now having your four-year-old daughter sleeping under your arm will only be a sweet memory. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could revisit the moment with more than your mind’s eye.

 

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In-camera Special Effects

Your Camera’s Special Effects

MediaNotesEpisode02 from drewke on Vimeo.

Your camera comes loaded with all sorts of special effects. But do you really want to shoot your video in black and white? In this, the second episode of Media Notes, I look at the benefits and liabilities to shooting your footage using your camera’s special effects.

Offering some insight into production, I hope you can see why I believe it is always best to “Keep it Clean”. In other words, shoot your video clean and add the effects later during editing. There are great tools out there for editing, many free or part of your computer’s operating system. Remember, if you add it when you shoot it, you can’t remove it.

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera

Media Notes Episode One – Digital Zoom

 

Episode 1 – Digital Zoom

Buying a video camera can be a frustrating experience. Not just choosing a camera, listening to a sketchy sales pitch and wrestling with sticker shock. The real frustration comes with discovering not only how it works, but learning how to shoot good movies with it right away. Most of us just want to turn on the camera and go… This episode is the first in a multipart series where users can glean common sense tips, and hopefully shoot better video. In this episode we examine the benefits and liabilities of the digital zoom.

The hope and expectation with this series is to guide new and experienced storytellers through the sometimes daunting process of creating an entertaining video. I expect to present my opinions based on real-world experience, and not based on a preference of one manufacturer over another. I will do my best to avoid the jargon and technical hoo-ha that floods most video blogs. If you are looking for a site that discussed the micro-volts of a particular CCD, this would not be the site. I want to give you some basic skills in shooting, lighting, audio, and editing.

I also want to shed some light on all the great new ways you can distribute your content. Just like digital technology and photo web sharing sites put and end to developing at the corner drug store, the same wave is sweeping through personal video creation. I am guessing that sharing your videos on line with friends and family will eliminate those long, grueling nights watching bad home movies in your neighbor’s living room. At least one can hope.

As a little background, I have been given the opportunity to teach documentary production at the university level for over 15 years, 13 of them at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition, I teach at the UW Graduate School in the Digital Media Masters Program.  I have worked in television and film for 30 years as a producer, writer, photographer and editor. My clients in the past 15 years have been predominately national and international productions for BBC, PBS, Disney, ABC, TLC, and Discovery. Most of my work is as a producer and editor, by my love is storytelling. I have extensive experience on editing platforms made by Avid, Discrete, Adobe and Apple. I do my best to be platform agnostic and I also tend to choose a particular tool based on what I can do with it… That is framed more by my comfort level than necessarily the potential of a particular platform.

There are very few “rules” to content creation. But there are a million “guidelines”. These guidelines are often framed by the experience of thousands of storytellers who have gone before us learning what works in a particular situation. I will do my best to give you the guidelines that have worked for me, and to always explain that what I present is not necessarily gospel, but knowledge gleaned from 30 years at the craft of storytelling.

My grandfather said you can’t argue taste, so opinion is just opinion. You may have one belief and I may hold another, but don’t let it stop you from commenting on the points of view I have put forward. I love a healthy and respectful dialog. It is a great way for all of us to learn and improve at the craft. Don’t be shy to comment on these posting, even if it is to say, “Dude, you have a face for radio.” You can contact me at drewke@u.washington.edu if you have questions, I will do my best to get back to you.

 

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