No School Like the Old School


I used to have the well earned reputation as the kid who was always carrying a camera. Starting in about 8th grade or so I fell in love with videotaping all of the shenanigans my friends and I got into. Then in 11th grade I was introduced to the world of "non-linear editing" with programs like Avid, Final Cut Pro and Media 100 and my fate was pretty much sealed. This "Got Pat?" promo, along with its sister video, were the product of my video production education during my short stay in Grand Rapids and helping produce "Central Sights," the morning news announcements at Grand Rapids Central High School. My friend Chris Ostertag is the guy manning the camera here. After getting a well rounded feel for Final Cut I never put my camera down and ridiculousness ensued.


One of my favorite memories of my Grandpa Joe was him telling me I could drive with as many girls in the car as i wanted, it was when you get a car full of boys that you start doing stupid things. Well Grandpa as it turns out that rule applies to boyhood activities outside the car as well. Of course my video making skills weren't only used for tomfoolery...


This video my buddy Chris and I made for a 10th grade biology presentation. Chris dressed up in a dinosaur halloween costume I wore when I was 4 years old. All of the editing was done in camera with fades and hard cuts. Quasi-educational, ridiculous, and fun... a summary that works for this next video as well.


This video was actually the first thing I ever edited in an non-linear program. I think I used every transition and text color available. I still love this thing, but maybe not as much as the next video.


This "Friends" video was a gift I gave all of my close friends in high school. I threw in as much video I could find. I know, it is dripping in nostalgia. Makes me miss all of these kids.

Okay, this post is almost over, but before I wrap it up I must include my greatest high school accomplishment: Midwest $$.


Good Times.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This book should not exist

Image
It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...
Read more

Finding "Clarity" in 1999

Image
I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...
Read more

My Favorite Creative

Image
As I type this two drastically different things are happening; I'm in California for a film festival and my mother, Linda Boberg, is lying in a Des Moines hospice bed. In fact she started hospice care the day I flew out here. As you can imagine, I'm experiencing quite the emotional tug of war. When you have a kid you commonly examine where they get certain traits. I've always been able to parse that I get my emotional, empathetic tendencies from my mother and my pragmatic, compartmentalizing skills from my Dad (another raging tug of war at the moment). This list could go on forever, but one thing I've never fully understood is where my creative drive came from. Now with the writing on the wall, it's obvious my mom flipped the creativity switch. It wasn't until my Mom self-published a novel at 65 years old that I understood how creative she is. In the last three years she's self published half a dozen books and written many more. Her first bout of cancer in 2...
Read more