film-making 101

I spent the last 48 hours (almost exclusively) editing a 30-minute video.

The video is of the one-act play that I directed at the local high school this past winter. It's titled Minnesota Loon, and is a socio-environmental play about a homeless woman trying to stop the corporate polluting in a local lake.

I video-taped the production three different nights, from three different locations in the house; down-loaded the videos to my computer; added some intro music and credits; and burned 20 copies for the kids involved.

It is a long, boring process at times, yet a lot of fun as well. It's as if it is just one more opportunity for me to be creative. I'd already staged the play to look good to an audience in the theatre, now I was "staging" it to look good while watching it on a computer or television screen.

The technology and availablity of software programs is so proliferent that it can offer amateur accessibility to just about any field one might desire.

For the record, I used Pinnacle Studio 8 movie maker. I picked up this un-opened version on eBay for under $10.

Will I ever become a professional film/video editor? No. But I don't have to, and I don't have to watch a boring, flat video of the play, and I don't have to pay a lot of money to have someone else create this video for me. Ten bucks and a little of my time...not bad.