You don’t need fancy equipment. What you need is a story.
About 30-some years ago I made my first video. It was at my elementary school and we had a giant Sony camera connected to a giant Sony videotape recorder. I’m pretty sure it was a U-matic (3/4”) format. I don’t remember what the video was about but I do remember making it, which is probably one of the reasons I got into the business I did.
How to shoot and edit your own video circa 1990-ish.
About 10 years later I got my first advertising job at a small agency in Chicago. One of my first assignments was to create a presentation to honor a long-time employee who was leaving (her name was Julie, but I don’t remember her last name). They didn’t specify what form that presentation had to be, but they had a video camera so I decided to make a video.
The camera recorded to VHS and the quality wasn’t very good. And the camera was big. Like TV News big.
I went around and interviewed everyone at the company and asked them a simple question: “What are you going to miss about Julie?” Everybody said nice stuff.
I thought it might be funny if I also asked the same question to the building’s security guard, the maintenance staff and cleaning crew as well as some random people on the street. Then I filmed things around the office like chairs, desks, trash cans and urinals because I thought it would be funny to cut those in arbitrarily. I titled the video “Julie Doesn’t Work Here Anymore” as an homage to the movie, although it had absolutely nothing to do with “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”
My boss didn’t know much about what I was doing, except for the interviews I did with the staff. He also didn’t offer up much help, so when it came time to edit I was on my own.
This was before the Avid was invented. There was no Final Cut or Premiere or iMovie or Avid. This was pre-NLE. Luckily they had a couple of 1/2-inch VHS machines. And I could play video out from the camera.
So to edit, I would find the first scene I wanted. Play it through the camera and record it to one of the VHS machines. Press pause. Then I’d find the next scene on the camera…and so on.
I created one “rough cut” and watched it over and over. Then I used the second machine to create the final–playing back the scenes I wanted in the right length and order on the first while I recorded on the second.
I did titles for it by writing them on a whiteboard with a sharpie and shooting them.
I’m pretty sure I added music to it as well, though my memory is not as clear on how I achieved this. I think what I did is play the final cut from machine two while recording on machine one–but only plugged in one channel of audio from machine two to machine one. The other channel came from a cassette deck, which I had to very carefully sync playback for it to work right.
I remember it getting a lot of laughs, but I’m sure I remember the video being better than it actually was. I recall the random shot of the urinal was met with confusion, not laughter as I intended. I do wish I still had a copy of the video somewhere, but it was lost over the years.
What’s the point of this story anyway?
Well, now we have cameras accessible to almost anyone that can shoot video at a resolution that can be shown in a movie theater. We can edit, do sound design, motion graphics… almost anything that 20 years ago was the exclusive domain of professionals in multi-million-dollar studios.
The technology we have at our fingertips now is mind-blowing.
However because of this technology, I think people tend to jump right away to execution. We make things that are randomly shot pretty pictures edited together with music we think is cool and add some titles that are likely in Futura like Wes Anderson does (or maybe with a really small all caps italic serif), and then we add some sound that was picked up in-camera like a video we saw on Vimeo, and finish it by color correcting with some LUTs or maybe by spending way too many hours in Resolve.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this. I’ve done plenty of it and been jealous of amazing examples of this. Because doing this is great practice. We get better at evaluating a scene, better at developing our own unique “eye,” holding and moving a camera, better at the craft of editing and sound design and music curation… and using Resolve.
But I find when I watch videos like these, I start grabbing the scrub bar at about :20 in. Because after a while, they get boring.
They’re boring because without a narrative, a story, a theme or point of view, there’s no dramatic tension to compel someone to keep watching. They rely completely on just pure technical and executional appeal.
This is the blessing and the curse of technology.
When we didn’t have these amazing toys, we didn’t focus on the technology. We focused on the story we wanted to tell, the point of view we wanted to get across or the idea in our head we wanted to get out. And then we used what was available to try and make that idea a reality. The technology wasn’t all that exciting, instead what excited us was the idea and the potential to make it real. We embraced the process, and because that process took time we didn’t rush the end result. (Instant gratification wasn’t even a possibility.)
I write this in part to remind myself that though I love the technology and the toys and playing around with color grades, it’s too easy to rush past all the important parts. Like why someone would want to watch your video in the first place.
About me: I’m a Partner/Creative Director at Teak in San Francisco. I’m from Colorado, moved to Chicago for 8 years then settled down in San Anselmo, California (the birthplace of mountain biking) with my wife to raise two amazing kids. I’m a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs, Denver Broncos and Peet’s Coffee.
This is me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Read my previous Medium article here.
