Remember sitting in a class room during high school and thinking to yourself, “When am I ever going to need to know this?” I was in a high school film class in the mid-seventies. I really did not take the class to learn anything useful. I took it to have fun. In addition to learning film history and how films were made, we had to break into groups and make our own short film. Each group had to write a script, decide who would star in what roles, who would be the cameraman, director, and editor, and so forth. I enjoyed the class.
There was no such thing as a camcorder in those years. We used a super 8mm film camera. Film, not tape. We has to send the film out to be developed. When it came time to edit we literally had to cut and paste (tape) the film. It was fun to make the film, and even more fun to watch the class reaction when we all watched it.
Let us jump ahead ten years. Melrose has a new community access television station, Mel-TV3. Camcorders (vhs) are becoming popular in households. In fact, one of the Scouting families owns a camcorder. I decide it is time to start filming troop functions to play “on the air”. It will be a great way to show the community what we do in Boy Scouting, so I join the station’s board of directors. We begin with taping court of honors and soon are creating “original” productions.
Let us jump ahead twenty years more, to today’s digital world. I am still making videos with the Scouts. I now own a digital camcorder and a Macintosh computer so I can do all my editing at my home instead of at the television studio. I still produce Scouting shows for Mel-TV, and now am being asked to provide shows for a second local television station. I can hit a wider audience through placing videos on the internet. Some of my videos are found on our troop’s website, my podcast, Youtube, and some other video sites. People from around the world can see these videos.
Sometimes I think back to those days in that high school film class, and then think about how much the technology of film making has come. I am doing things now I never would have dreamed of doing then. I just wish I would have taken a typing class.
