Viewfinder: Why We Like Making Video

When my colleagues and I first started making video, many of us loved learning the magic behind the TV industry. I had a fascination with the art of making moving pictures. I had grown up watching lots of television. I grew to equate television with fame because, back when I was a kid, every TV program had an enormous audience. Prior to VCRs, everything on TV came into the home through an antenna via broadcast or over cable. There was no such thing as a special interest video or a wedding video. TV was the big time. The people in the TV business seemed very powerful and important to me. I bet that many of you felt the same way or had similar experiences.

I remember a dream that I had the night after I first edited video. In the dream, I had a profound appreciation for the power I had in making edit decisions. This appreciation focused upon the power to decide what I should include and when. I had the power to decide if a scene was worthy of inclusion or if a given scene would have been better had it occurred at another time. In the dream, I began to confuse videotape with reality. It seemed to me that I had the power to control what happened and when, not on a videotape, but in real life. I could fast forward or rewind time itself. I could omit things from history. It was an odd dream.

For me, the meaning of the dream is that there's really nothing like making video. Creating TV programs allows us to express ourselves like no other medium. There are many ways for use to express our vision. We can write a poem, draw a picture, paint a portrait, sculpt a statue, throw a clay pot or compose a song, but nothing is like making a video. With video, we can vividly and realistically convey our ideas and opinions to others. Watching a video is very much like having an actual experience; video producers can control two of the senses of the audience--vision and hearing--in such a way that they seem to be temporarily present within the video. Because of the nature of video, TV programs can have a tremendous impact on t…