It all began with an old video camera, a backyard, and some friends. I basically taught myself to edit, but without any program or even a computer for that matter. What I did have access to was a VCR and some record-able tapes. I’d hit stop, start, rewind, record over and over until I got it right. The content? We liked to create mock music videos using prerecorded songs. It taught me a great lesson in planning out a shot list and how to keep someone engaged while watching with unique shots every few seconds that didn’t jar the mind. I would later learn that this is called a jump cut. Most of these videos amounted to nothing and were shown to maybe a few people before being lost forever as we recorded over our work with new material.
Overtime I started using video to tell stories, but most of the time the story was just in my head, so the film wouldn’t make any sense to a viewer. But like a good mom and dad, “It looks great sweety.”
YouTube
Eventually, YouTube came around. At first, it just seemed like a place for people to post their dumb videos. Like an instant America’s Funniest Home Videos. Then the early “YouTubers” started to capitalize on the platform and the webseries was born. Trying to follow suit, I posted some of our old videos up, not realizing that we couldn’t monetize them because we had used other people’s music. They got taken down, but I put some things back up later unlisted when YouTube got a little more relaxed. The most popular of these was probably the “music video” of me singing Bad Day by Daniel Powter while wondering around Disneyland. That’s right, it was a bad day at the happiest place on earth. Banksy wasn’t the first one to do it after all.
Regardless, we had fun and it motivated us to make more content. We started telling actual stories and our imaginations came to life. From cheap actions films to strange comedies, my childhood was full of filmmaking.
“Yes, that is a racket guitar.”
I was already ahead of the game by the time I started the fantastic film school program at my Catholic High School. Too bad I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living…