"Waterpark!!!" - Director's Notes

Who hasn't been to a water park by the time they're 30-years-old???  That's right, ME.  Well, we fixed that!  My friend Charlie joined my wife and I at the Water Park of America here in the Twin Cities, MN.  Even better - he brought the GoPro!

Check out Water Park of America if you're in, or live in, the area.  Best place to be in the dead of winter.  (Notice the icicles hanging from the tubes.)

You can also watch the video on YouTube.

Director's Notes:  Digital Scrapbooking

There isn't a whole lot to say about this movie.  Charlie owns an older generation GoPro.   I wanted to go to a waterpark.  The camera is waterproof.  What the hell!  Bring it with.  I told Charlie that if I ever decided to do something with the footage I would have him help me edit it.   When we finally did, it took us a single evening to cut the whole thing.  The end.

Doing something like this is a really great way of capturing an experience.  Call it digital or video scrapbooking, if you will.  With taking photos, you trim them down to a digestible quantity and share them, be it by posting them on Facebook, organizing a photo album for the coffee table, or making a scrapbook. 

But what do you do with any videos you take?

There were several VHSs laying around my house growing up of family footage.  I have no idea what happen to those tapes.  My guess is that they're gone.  The main reason for that is the simple reality that no one wants to watch them.  We're talking about hours of family gatherings.  It's just too much footage, most of which is boring to watch.   Why not take that footage, clip out only the entertaining pieces, organize them by theme, possibly lay in some music, and make yourself a video montage?

I know my initial reaction is to covet the material and say "it's all important."  It's not.  Trust me.   Even with something as fun as going to a water park, the footage we had - especially watched all in one sitting - was uninteresting.  And we were the ones who lived it!  If we didn't get excited about it, why would anyone else?  

It wasn't until we started cutting it down - 30 minutes down to 10, and then down to 6, and then shorter - that it started to become something nostalgic.   We had to give up some footage that wasn't too bad, but by doing so the end product became sharper.  You can't be too precious about your material.

Now we have a short, fun video that we can rewatch as much as we want to.  It's not grueling to get through.  It's short.  It highlights only some the best moments of the day.  Furthermore, it's something we can share, and others seem to enjoy as well.

If we hadn't done it, it would have become 30 minutes of data sitting in a folder on my laptop, doomed to never be looked at again, until one day we deleted it for good.