Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Nowadays everyone shoots video, whether from their mobile phones, solid state camcorders, miniDV Camcorders, old style video tape recorders … it’s all over the place. I call it VideoPangaea because it involves so many more people than ever before in the production of moving images. Everybody’s a videographer these days, which means it has entered the basic skill set for educated citizens in the U.S.

This was brought home to me today when I walked into my First Year Seminar and all the students shouted at me that I was “famous”! After a bit of verbal jostlery, I finally found out what they meant: Evie Telfer, the Messiah Chaplain had videotaped me and another Professor jokingly asking “why?” on Monday, and screened the tape in Chapel on Tuesday. By being projected on a large screen for a few seconds, I had become “famous” to them. The sense of who I was as a human being became magnified in their eyes by being magnified on screen. But it wasn’t some large Hollywood Studio or TV Corporation which had effected this. No, it was the school Chaplain, who later said to me she had shot the whole thing in less than an hour! Video skills have become as common as writing skills for many people in their 30s and younger. And, I must add, have made these folks much more powerful communicators.

This is related to the vast expansion of venues for screening video — from the postage stamp size of a small mobile phone, to the large screens of theatres and Churches. “Where will it end, where will it end?” asked Ian Curtis. I’ll write more of this phenomenon and what it bodes for the future of cinema in my next post.