intro to me and my camcorder
so, i have some exciting news. okay well not really but it’s exciting to me.
i recently obtained an old digital camcorder that my parents used in the early 2000s. its a camera that i know my parents recorded a lot of my baby moments in and so i had my dad bring it to my roommates family (who was visiting uci) so that i could play around with it. i have always wanted to get into video making and film-directing sorts so i was pretty excited to get it last friday.
what is a camcorder
i am supposed to elaborate but i don’t know how much more i could explain it. i think its sony something? i am not really sure but anyways, imagine an old school camera with its signature opening tab viewer thingie that ur dad probably has somewhere in a drawer. that’s what my camcorder is. it’s also black. and i love it because it really has so much history built into it inherently; it is literally a part of my history, something that existed as a part of my childhood. and as a result, it has that vintage, grainy look to it but not one that is engineered to pretend to be history, it is what modern tech looked like when i was growing up. if you want to see it, its on my instagram and maybe what i am saying will make a little more sense. anyways, as u can tell i think its pretty cool.
i dont think i need to explain how recording things work to our generation so i wont but what i will explain, ironically, is the parts of the old tech that you might not imagine. firstly, my favorite, it has a zoom function. on the base of the camera, there’s a little knob that zoooms in or zoooms out and i think it is the coolest thing ever. something i remember very specifically about film 85a is something my professor said about the zoom function. while we can perform typical camera functions like a dolly, which is just when a camera comes closer to the subject, our human eyes cannot zoom. our eyes cannot use distance to focus on something; it’s a manmade function. and today, the notorious zoom has fallen out of contemporary filmmaking while it’s prevalence stays in the glamor of the 80’s and 90’s.
to add to that, the quality of the camera itself isn’t particularly good. it has that vintage tint to it. you know, slightly undersaturated, super grainy, but these aspects are exactly why i like it. it’s like time traveling and now i get to participate in an era where camcorders really were the only option.
camcorder adventures
so what did i do with my fancy new toy. well the same day that i got it, my friend was visiting from ucla. shes a very close friend of mine and we have been friends for a very long time. she’s also one of the few people that i really trust and i would say we have a very intimate friendship. since she was visiting for the first time, me and the third member of our little trio had made plans for an eventful weekend. and though i we did have a lot of fun, most of my camcorder minutes were just of us being stupid in my dorm. my roommate was there too and it was fun. i think they got annoyed at me but i idk it felt necessary to quietly film my closest friends. i really wanted to embody what it was the camcorder stood for; captivated memories of a good time. i wanted to record the same way my parents wanted to remember me as a kid, careful not to miss anything so that, in thirty years, i can remember what life was like when i was younger. i really did record intending to hurt adult me with my own nostalgia. i hope that was an adequate explanation but anyways.
i think, other than random dorm things, i have a lot of footage of us just walking. just walking. on campus, in buildings. at the beach, in the sand, a golden hood over 4 p.m. skin. a lot of the footage i know will be beautiful. not because i only recorded my camera only when it was beautiful, bellieve me most of it was the most menial of things, but because it was the truth of what my life was that weekend. most of it just happened to have its own beauty. maybe 4 people on a rug watching a bad movie and falling asleep isnt the most conventionally attractive, but the honesty in the video as a depiction of that eventful saturday is beautiful in the same way we need to love the menial things. to find beauty in them. and i would show you but i haven’t figured out how to upload or even look over the footage yet. i need a cord or something. i dont know ill have to run to target later and figure it out.
camcorders in film and other things
in this last section, we will look at the old-school camera look in films. well only one film i think. and one of my friends own vlog that she recorded on her own digital recorder.
our first example is:
Aftersun (2022)
conveniently, this film was recommended to me by the same friend who made the video that i just talked about. i think i owe some of my own inspiration to this friend as well. i find her artistic creations to be so beautiful. she does a great job and she also inspires me through her photography. yeah shes pretty great.
anyways, the film.
Aftersun (2022) is a film about nostalgia and fatherhood. of the first things i love about the film is it’s cinematography and, above that, the actor playing the father, paul mescal’s, does a perfect embodiment of a father trying his best. so if u get a chance, it is definitely a performance worth watching.
what’s also enticing is the medium in which the movie was made: the film combines the contemporary videography with camcorder footage that our main characters, sophie and calum, switch between. and together with anti-chronological editing, the movie portrays snippets of sophie’s current life, her memories, and the camcorder to piece together a puzzle of her father. but i would like to note that our questions as the audience do not allude to just a simple who or what or why it is that everything is the way it is. in the contrary, the entirety of the mystery is just of her father, a puzzle that that even the audience sees is completely fragmented in the same way that sophie herself understands it. and this message is geniusly encoded in random ins and outs of scenes and blanks in the story itself.
the camcorder’s presence, in my opinion, was terrific because it seamlessly creates nostalgic illusions that the film elegantly dance through. so yeah again, if you get a chance, you should definitely see the film. perhaps the plot itself isn’t exactly the most eye-catchingly enticing but trust me, it gets there. and even if it doesn’t, i assure you that the production of the movie certainly is.
secondly:
my friends little montage thingie of our senior ball. i remember her trailing us as we were going about our festivities and now i am grateful i have something that i can remember the time with. when i watch it, it definitely gives me a rollercoaster back to last april. and although it might not for you, i hope you kind of get a gist of what diving into tools of the past does. and while you’re here, go check out her page i think her photography account is pretty cool and im sure you will agree that she is incredibly talented.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/Cc1a8lQp0wY/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
i hope you enjoyed today’s incredibly looong post. i did but now i am tired of writing so i will just leave this here.
goodbye for now
sincerely,
jaden