In this ninth episode of THE BURNZO CAST, Matt cuts to the chase and discusses all the amateur filmmaking he used to do between the years 2000 and 2004. This was truly the dawn of the digital age when digital video equipment - including video cameras, laptops and editing software - were first becoming available for amateurs to make no-budget DIY films with.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
INTRO
Hello everyone and welcome to Episode #9 of THE BURNZO CAST. This is your host Matt Burns speaking. For the last three episodes, we talked about video games, but for THIS episode we’re going to switch gears and talk about something completely different. I want to talk about amateur filmmaking at the dawn of the digital age, which was around the Y2K area, give or take a couple of years. For me, there was a period of time between the year 2000 and 2004 where I was spending a lot of time making short amateur films and most of these films were made with the first generation of digital video camera and video editing equipment, some of the first consumer digital equipment to ever exist for video production. So, if you don’t mind, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing this period of time in my life when I discovered that semi-decent movies could be made with nothing but a simple digital video camera and a laptop.
But before we get into this episode, here’s a quick word from our sponsor:
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THE PODCAST
Ok, welcome back to THE BURNZO CAST. Again, this is episode #9, called “Amateur Filmmaking at the dawn of the digital age.” Let’s cut to the chase here and get right into this podcast. Shall we?
All right, let me take you back to the year 1998. I was a junior in high school at this time, around 17 years old. Up until this point in my life, I never really thought I would ever want to become a filmmaker or be interested in filmmaking. I mainly aspired to be one of three things. When I was really young, I wanted to be a professional basketball player, but I abandoned this dream by about the eighth grade or even sooner, mainly because I wasn’t all that good at basketball. I mean, I was pretty good. I played CYO basketball and went to basketball camp and such. But I wasn’t good enough to go pro.
I was also a big drummer and percussionist when I was young, so becoming a drummer in a rock band was definitely a dream of mine at one point.
More than anything else, though, I had this dream of becoming an actor. In fact, I wanted to be a child actor, not necessarily because I liked acting (although I did like acting), but because I had this fantasy of becoming Jodi Sweetin’s boyfriend who played Stephanie Tanner on the show Full House. I had a huge crush on Jodi Sweetin and I thought she’d be interested in me if I became a big child actor like herself. This dream unfortunately never manifested itself. If it did, you would have obviously heard about it. Jodi and I would have been in the Tiger Beat magazines as Hollywood’s biggest child star couple.
By the time I was in high school, Full House was off the air and I came to terms with the fact that it didn’t look like I was going to become a child actor in Hollywood or Stephanie Tanner’s boyfriend for that matter. I did, however, still figure I would grow up to be an actor in some shape or form and, although I did a lot of theater acting, I had my eyes set on movies or TV.
However, in my junior year of high school, there was a turning point in my life. As an elective course, I took a film studies class. We watched many films in this class, including but not limited to Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and, if my memory serves me correctly, To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck. I also have this memory of watching a quote “fun” movie at the end of the semester and that movie was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Anyway, I walked away from this class at the end of the semester with a whole new fascination. I had always LIKED movies and I was interested in acting in them, but now I was interested in film as a means of artistic expression and I was also interested in how to make films.
When it came time to look at colleges that next summer, I concluded that I wanted to go to school for film. This was mainly because film was all new to me and it was something I wanted to learn more about. I still wanted to act and play the drums in bands and such, but I didn’t see it as worthwhile going to school for acting or percussion since I could kind of do all that on my own. I was learning film as a new skill I could add to my talents, so going to a film school made the most sense to me.
After a lot of different college touring, I narrowed my choices down to two colleges: Emerson College and Boston University. In the end, I went with BU because it seemed like they were less intensive about its film program. I wanted to make sure I got a well-rounded education. BU would expose me to a lot of different Communication classes and liberal arts courses, humanities etc. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get super intensive into film, so this sounded like the better path to go down.
As it turned out, though, I never really took a film course at BU until my second semester sophomore year. In hindsight, that was fine but maybe at the time I would have preferred to start getting into the film courses a liiiitle earlier. It wasn’t a huge deal, though. Because by about halfway through my freshman year, I started teaching myself filmmaking. And I was able to do this because the year 2000, Y2K, was essentially the dawn of the digital age. There were relatively cheap and consumer-friendly filmmaking tools available for me to purchase and learn how to use, including digital video cameras that shot on MiniDV tapes, powerful laptops and user-friendly editing software. I didn’t have to wait to learn filmmaking at BU. I could start learning it on my own.
For a video camera, I went to a store in Norwood, MA. called “The Camera Company” and bought this camera called the Canon Optura PI. It cost around $1200, I believe. In hindsight, this was a great camera. It had very crisp video quality for its time. You could shoot in black and white and there were a lot of different effects that you could use, most of which were cheesy and impractical, in my opinion. But there was an image stabilizer on this camera that blew me away. Cameras I’ve had in later years shook with every single little movement but the Canon Optura PI had an image stabilizer so awesome it was almost like you were shooting with a SteadiCam rig.
As far as editing software goes, the very first version of Final Cut Pro was newly available at this time, but it was a little too complicated for ME, an 18-year-old, to learn. There was a less complex, user-friendly software that had just come out called iMovie, so I decided to get that instead. At that time, it didn’t come pre-loaded onto Apple computers, so I had to pay about fifty dollars or so and buy it separately. But it ended up being a great program for a beginner filmmaker like myself and, if you think about it, even a simple program like iMovie was way better than, say, a Steenbeck flatbed editing machine that you had to use in the olden days. Or, in video, you had to use those linear tape-to-tape machines…that is, use two tapes to edit something, one tape being the raw video source and then the other tape containing the edited sequences of the shots from your source tape. I used a tape-to-tape machine in a high school TV production class circa 1998.
And for a laptop? Well, I already had one of the best laptops on the market, at least at that time. This was the Apple PowerBook G3 (the Pismo model, I think) and I got this for a high school graduation gift the summer before I started at BU. Apple was running ads in magazines that said you could use the PowerBook G3 with a digital video camera and Final Cut Pro (or, in my case, iMovie) and that’s all you needed to start making your own movies and video productions. I remember the camera featured in these ads was a Canon but a notch or two better than mine. It was called something like the Canon XL1, I believe. This was a more professional camera for sure but it was a tad too expensive for me at the time. The Canon Optura PI would suit me well enough.
Oh, and I forgot one more key piece of equipment: a 4-6pin Firewire cable. Remember Firewire? Before USB-C cables and lightning cables and such, there were Firewire cables and Firewire hard drives. At the time, these were the fastest connections you could get for your computer. In order to import video from a camera to your computer, you needed a connection that was fast enough because raw digital video packed a lot of data. A Firewire cable provided that fast connection you needed. So you would hook the cable into a 4-pin port on your video camera and then connect the camera to your laptop via a 6-pin FireWire port on the laptop. My PowerBook G3 had at least two Firewire ports on it, along with several USB ports, S-video ports, a VGA external monitor port, microphone input, headphone output and maybe a couple other ports I don’t remember. Where most laptops today only have a couple ports on them (mainly USB-C ports), the laptops of the Y2K era had ports up the wazoo. Apple has certainly gone in a more minimalist route over the years, probably because they want their laptops to be as light as possible.
Anyway, once I had all my equipment ready to go –the camera, the laptop, the iMovie and the trusty Firewire cable—I started making lots of videos and eventually made my first short movie, which was a horror film called GUTTER.
I shot GUTTER right around December of the year 2000. In the movie, I play a psycho out to murder my friend Tim for no reason that is explained in the movie. Tim is portrayed as a big fan of the show Full House, but other than that, we don’t get much character development. Basically, the movie opens with me saying something creepy to the audience in voice over, there are some brief opening titles and then we see creepy images of the winter. Then we cut to the inside of a house, Tim is watching Full House with his friend Mark and then we cut to me breaking and entering into the house, then I go down into the basement and kill Tim but Mark has already disappeared with no explanation. Talk about a huge continuity error. In fact, this movie was so flawed that it basically made Ed Wood look like Steven Spielberg.
After I do the murder, I pose in a Christ-like formation and then the movie cuts to the end credits. Again, there is no explanation as to why I committed the murder and why I pose in Christ-like formation. Maybe I was just supposed to be the devil incarnate—who knows? No, it wasn’t the greatest movie ever made, but it was a decent first film.
I shot GUTTER in Black and White, mainly because I liked how the black and white video looked and thought it was aesthetically appropriate for the movie’s dark content. I even shot a couple gory scenes in the movie where I used Caro syrup and red food dye for blood. I later learned, however, that it was easier to use Hershey’s chocolate syrup for blood when you’re shooting in black and white. I think legend has it that Alfred Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for blood in the movie Psycho. That’s the best and easiest way to go, in my opinion.
After editing GUTTER on iMovie, I was left feeling rather impressed with what I had made. Again, not that GUTTER was a great movie, but I found it amazing that all you had to do was throw a few shots together on iMovie (in a creative and crafty way, mind you) and you could create the illusion for an audience that a murder is taking place. It sounds like a cliché, but it was definitely like magic. Just the fact that you could get a couple friends and use your smalltime digital video equipment and then make a short, ten-minute movie … well, this made you feel empowered. You didn’t need Hollywood. You could literally do it all yourself or at least with a few friends. I remember saying to myself at the time that I could just keep doing this my whole life and be fine only doing this. I don’t need to go to Hollywood. If I have a story I want to share with the world, I can just do it with my amateur equipment and that would be fine with me.
That next spring of 2001, I decided to make another movie. This one was definitely more ambitious and definitely involved more planning. It was going to be an “action movie” and I would call it BRITISH DINGO FROM IRELAND (the name came from my inability to speak in an Irish accent without it sounding either British or Australian). Running about 12 minutes in length, BRITISH DINGO FROM IRELAND starred me as this dude named the British Dingo from Ireland who does a big drug deal with these shady characters named Pristine and Kado. But Kado and Pristine try to screw him over, a big gun battle ensues and then the Dingo comes out on top. Not only does he keep the drugs but he keeps the money, too. It’s a win-win for Mr. Dingo.
BRITISH DINGO FROM IRELAND was very influenced by the movie Boondock Saints that was popular at the time. Like Boondock Saints, BRITISH DINGO was kind of an action, drug and gangster movie that took place in South Boston. Like I said, I got ambitious in this movie. I used toy guns for guns and we lit a firecracker to simulate a bullet ricocheting off a beer can. I didn’t have any blanks or squibs at my disposal, but through the magic of editing and sound effects, I was able to create the illusion that a gun battle was taking place, just like with GUTTER where I created the illusion that a murder was taking place. Editing was definitely my best friend in the whole wide world. In a later movie I did called GAS, later retitled ONLY ENTERTAINMENT, I created an illusion of a fast car chase through the magic of editing. But I’ll get to GAS in a moment.
When I finished BRITISH DINGO, I was very proud of it (even though it still wasn’t that great of a movie), but I wanted more people than just my friends to see the movie. This was long before the days of YouTube and Vimeo, but there was this website called iFilm.com that, for a small fee, I submitted my movie to and they uploaded it onto their website for the world to see.
To promote the movie, I went around town and hung up fliers at local businesses, at least at the places that would allow me to do so. Remember, social media was non-existent at this point, no Facebook or Twitter, not even Myspace, so you had to literally get your boots on the ground and hang up real fliers in the real world.
My movie was live on the ifilm.com website for about two months (I think) but it did get about 50 views, which, to me, was a big deal. I mean, that was like having a movie premiere and having 50 whole people in the audience. I, of course, get a lot more views than that on YouTube these days, but I was still blown away that 50 whole people had seen a movie that I basically made with my own bare hands.
After BRITISH DINGO FROM IRELAND, I made the aforementioned movie GAS, which, like I said before, I ended up renaming to ONLY ENTERTAINMENT about a year later. GAS was even more ambitious than BRITISH DINGO. This was my first movie I made in color and it was all about chase sequences, both in a car but also on foot. The plot involves two teens named Fritz and Theo played by my friends Tim and Mark. They play Mario Kart, one beats the other, I think it’s Theo that is pissed that Fritz won, or maybe the other way around, and then a real-life car chase ensues between Fritz and Theo’s bodyguard played by my friend Jeremy. The movie is about fantasy being blurred with reality or something along those lines. After the car chase there is a foot chase and then a big climax that takes place under high tension wires. I actually just took a moment to rewatch this movie and it’s been a while since I watched it so I sort of watched it with a fresh pair of eyes, almost as though somebody else made it. Well, I was laughing my ass off, especially at the end. I was nearly in tears. It's a pretty good amateur movie if I do say so myself. Bizarre as anything but good and fun.
Also notable about GAS was that I was experimenting with stop-motion animation at this time. I was big into the filmmaker Tim Burton and loved the movie Nightmare Before Christmas, which, of course, was shot entirely with stop-motion photography. Feeling inspired by the movie, I decided I wanted to try doing stop-motion photography myself. In GAS, I tried using stop-motion photography to create the illusion that matchbox cars were moving on their own. Shooting the cars frame by frame was too difficult to do on a video camera but basically what I would do was press record on the camera and then stop, then move the car a tad, press record again and then stop and keep doing this. On iMovie, I could tighten the shots a bit so that they were only a few frames long and, abracadabra, you got stop-motion animation. To my surprise, the end result ended up looking great, like the matchbox cars were actually moving on their own, and you can see these animation shots in the opening title sequence of GAS.
Now, the first version of the movie, entitled GAS, was pretty good but I ultimately thought it could be better, so about a year later, I had just finished reading the book by Robert Rodriguez called Rebel Without a Crew, I felt all inspired, so I went ahead and reedited GAS and this new version of the movie was definitely the superior version. In fact, it was so superior that I thought I should give it a new title and that title became ONLY ENTERTAINMENT, named after a song by the band Bad Religion.
Shortly after finishing GAS was when I actually started taking my first production course at BU. It was called Film Production One and this was when I officially learned how to make films and we’re talking actual films here, shot on 16mm film. We used a Bolex in this class, which was one of those cameras that you wound up with a hand crank and then you could shoot for up to 30 seconds or so without any battery-power whatsoever. Then we would edit on Steenbeck flatbed editing machines, which was extremely tedious, especially when you were used to digital editing like I was at that point, but the end product was more rewarding because, let’s face it, no video, even to this day, looks better than actual film. Plus, the whole process of editing a film with your own bare hands, literally splicing shots together to create an edited sequence, was a process that I feel every filmmaker should experience at least once in their lifetime. Editing a film like that makes you feel more like a craftsman, kind of like you’re doing blue-collar manual labor, while editing a film on a computer almost feels more like office work. There’s definitely a difference.
I ended up making three films in my Production One course, two of which were edited on the Steenbeck. The first film I made was actually an in-camera edit, meaning you carefully made a shot list for a short film and shot your film shot-by-shot, in sequence, so that when you projected the roll of film on a screen you would already have an edited film. No other editing was allowed. I guess the purpose of this project was to get you to be prepared as a filmmaker. If you spent a lot of time planning your film out and making a shot list and storyboards etc., very little editing would ever be needed. In other words, this was an exercise in pre-production and stressed the importance of putting a lot of time and effort into the pre-production phase of film production.
For my first film, the in-camera-edit, I made this little movie called UNDERWEAR REVENGE. This was about a bitter homeless transient who gets revenge on all his enemies by leaving his soiled underpants in places where his enemies will have no choice but to touch them (for example, in the film, he leaves his soiled underpants in the purse of a girl he doesn’t like). Yeah, this was a weird film for sure. For the role of the transient, I casted a fellow BU student named Jake who had an interesting look to him. Long hair. Beard. Kind of looked like a cross between Jesus and Charles Manson. And I actually ended up casting him in several of my other films…I think four in all.
For my second film, which I DID edit on the Steenback, I made a film called MENTAL PUBERTY, which was also about a homeless transient who is carving a jack-o-lantern on a sidewalk and the carving of the jack-o-lantern is supposed to symbolize him digging into his disturbed psyche or something like that. I had a lot of fun thinking of ways to shoot the carving of the jack-o-lantern, including one shot where I actually carved a hole in the back of the pumpkin, and shot the camera through the eyes, nose and mouth of the jack-o-lantern, the end result being like a masking effect. It was basically like a POV shot from inside the pumpkin. I also experimented with flash frames in this project. I would take three or four frames of a shot and splice them into a sequence to create a flash-frame effect. Why the three or four frames? Because I found that splicing in just one frame was too quick, something that would only be useful if you wanted to have subliminal messages in your film, but in my case, I wanted the viewer to consciously see these images, so they needed to be longer than simply one frame.
The third film I made in my Production One class was called ACTAEON: PORTRAIT OF A PEEPING TOM and this was a black comedy, kind of inspired by Ed Wood’s film Glen or Glenda. I thought it would be funny to make a documentary-like film about a Peeping Tom, who, through voice over, tries to explain to the audience why he peeps and tries to justify why he peeps. This was definitely a strange film but that’s how I wanted it to be because that’s how Glen or Glenda was: strange. Although this film wasn’t as well-received as my MENTAL PUBERTY film, a few months later, I was showing some of my films to friends and one of my friends’ fathers happened to be in the room. He really got the black humor of the Peeping Tom film and was impressed with the movie. That’s all I needed to hear, that at least one person out there got what I was trying to do and appreciated the dark and more subtle humor.
About a year later, I took my second film production course at BU and this was called Film Production 2. We still shot on film in this course, but we actually ended up ditching Steenbeck editing machines and instead edited on the Avid, which is editing software that I think is pretty much obsolete these days, although I just looked it up and it seems like the opposite is true: that is, it still seems to be the standard for high-end film and video production, especially in Hollywood. Who knew? Because it seems to me like everyone is using Adobe Premiere these days. Anyway, yes, in Film Production 2, we ditched the flatbed editing machines and started editing on Avid. The CEO of Dreamworks animation Jeffrey Katzenberg was a BU alum and had a son who went to BU, so he donated a bunch of money to the school for a digital editing lab with several computers, all of which had Avid software on them, external FireWire drives…the works. BU saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to go the way of digital.
In this Film Production 2 course, I still shot on 16mm film but then we would get the film transferred to MiniDV tape and then edit the films digitally on Avid. Technically this was like doing an offline workprint of the film and, once you were done, you would conform your edited digital workprint to the original film negative and then make actual film prints of your edited movie, but we weren’t going to go that far. We would just edit on video and screen our films on video, but again, the point was to ultimately go back to film once you had a digital video workprint completed. You may have no idea what I’m talking about right now, it’s a little complicated. Basically what you’re doing is shooting on film, editing on video because it’s easier, but then you want to match your film negative to your edited video so that your final film is on film but now mirrors how you edited your video. Get it now? Probably not. Sorry, I’m horrible at explaining things.
Anyway, for these films in Production 2 we could shoot on color film if we liked, but I still shot on black and white, both because it was easier and also I liked how 16mm black and white film looked aesthetically. For a camera, we upgraded from the Bolex to the Arriflex and recorded synch sound on a NAGRA machine. This was actually the first time we used synch sound in our film: that is, recorded audio in synch with the film while we shot a scene. Dialogue was essentially synch sound, while in my previous films, if there was any dialogue, it was done in voice over.
My first film was called SYMPATHY FOR HITLER’S SOUL and this was a very short three-minute piece about Hitler’s soul confronting God after Hitler dies and complaining to God for putting him into such an evil body. It was a cool unique idea, if I do say so myself, and it was somewhat profound as well. This was a film that definitely made you think more than previous films I did. Some people have since compared it to the Pixar movie Soul but only in the sense that the film’s concepts are somewhat similar. Where did I come up with this idea, you may be asking? I’m not sure, but I do have a vague memory of it popping into my memory one day when I was in BU’s Mugar library. I think I was basically thinking about the idea of souls and how we may not choose what body we come into when we’re born on earth. I was also thinking about the Holocaust and whether it was Hitler’s mind or soul that led him to be so evil. What is it that makes up the human identity? The mind or the soul and if the mind leads us to do evil things, should our soul be held accountable? I mean, if we suffer from a mental illness that makes us do evil, is our soul still evil? Or does that remain pure throughout the illness?
You can view SYMPATHY FOR HITLER’S SOUL on my YouTube channel if you like. The best way to find it is just search on YouTube for “Matt Burns: Sympathy for Hitler’s Soul.” (Click HERE to view).
The second film I did in my Production 2 course was called THE SECOND BEAST and, although this was a group film I made with three other classmates, I did end up writing the movie and co-directing it and also starring in it. This wasn’t my plan, really, but we got to a point in the semester where my group didn’t have any ideas for a film and we were running out of time. Over spring break, I read a book called Cracking the Apocalypse Code and instantly got the idea for THE SECOND BEAST. The basic premise was this: An obsessive decoder of the Bible discovers that his best friend is the second beast prophecied in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation. Or at least so he thinks. He might be a little crazy, but that’s up for the audience to decide. I played this obsessive decoder.
I remember part of our assignment was to first make a rough cut of the film, then show that cut to our classmates and professor and have them critique it. The rough cut was really bad and the criticism was harsh. This was mostly because we didn’t have a whole lot of time to edit up until that point. One issue we had was that we didn’t shoot enough coverage and we found ourselves lacking a few insert shots that we desperately needed. Due to a lack of time, we couldn’t go back and do these shots on film, so what I ended up doing was shooting these inserts by myself with my trusty Canon Optura PI video camera. Film and digital video cut together like oil and vinegar, so those shots ended up standing out as awkward, but we didn’t have any other alternative but to use them.
We did, however, have more time to edit the film, so we went back into the editing room and we made THE SECOND BEAST much much better. In fact, the final cut was so much better that our classmates and our professor were kind of shocked by how much it had improved. I think our professor ended up giving us an A- or maybe even an A.
The year was 2004 now and that summer I ended up editing a movie I had shot that previous winter on my own. This movie was called WENDEL’S REVENGE. With WENDEL’S REVENGE, I basically took the concept of my short film UNDERWEAR REVENGE, expanded on it and what I got was WENDEL’S REVENGE. I guess this movie was one half horror movie and the other half revenge movie. Wendel is this outcast who is bullied by a jerk named Rat Bonze. Rat Bonze gets a pair of soiled underwear and does a drive-by under-pansting where he tosses his soiled briefs out the car window at Wendel’s face. Wendel is rollerblading at the time, so the briefs blind him and he goes crashing into a trash barrel. He’s mega pissed off, so he tracks down Rat Bonze and gets his revenge by beating him into an oblivion and in the end, he rips Rat Bonze’s heart out of his chest, Mortal-Kombat-style. Yes, this was a bizarre movie, not as thought-provoking as my other movies, but definitely a fun one.
What makes WENDEL’S REVENGE unique is that it was the first film I edited, not on iMovie, but on Final Cut Pro. Having learned Avid at school, I realized that Final Cut Pro was not much different. My parents had given me Final Cut Pro Express for Christmas or for my birthday or something like that, probably around the 2004 area. Final Cut Express was a slightly more user-friendly version of Final Cut Pro. The only main difference I found between Express and regular Final Cut was that there were a finite amount of sound tracks you could use when you were editing your film, maybe around five or so, maybe a few more (possibly 8)? Whereas in Final Cut Pro, I think you could edit with unlimited soundtracks. What this means in practical terms is that if you had a sequence that required a lot of sound layered on top of each other, then you needed to use a lot of soundtracks during the editing process. For example, if you were editing a car accident sequence, you would maybe need some dialogue (that is, car passengers saying “Oh no, we’re crashing”) and then one track having tires screeching, another track having the crash sound, the other track having glass break, the other track having ambient city noise, the other track having a horn honking etc. and these tracks had to be layered on top of each other, so you needed multiple tracks and I do know that in Final Cut Express these tracks were more limited than in normal Final Cut Pro. But that’s the only difference I remember between the two programs.
Anyway, yes, WENDEL’S REVENGE was the first movie I edited on Final Cut Pro and I was proud that I had graduated to a more complex editing software. I don’t think I ever edited anything on iMovie ever again. For the next 20 years or so, I would keep editing on Final Cut Pro. To this day, I only tried Adobe Premiere once, didn’t like it and just kept updating my Final Cut Pro software. I even edit my podcast episodes, including the one you’re listening to right now, on Final Cut Pro.
After I graduated from college in 2004, I definitely got more into writing than filmmaking. I was writing both a lot of screenplays and a lot of novels. I did, however, do a ton of video production, all kinds of wedding videography and corporate videos, marketing videos, things like that … and over the years I have probably edited hundreds and hundreds of videos. Amidst all this video production, I did make a few more short movies, a short paranormal documentary called A PARALLEL WORLD and two short comedies called SO SORRY and WE’RE GOOD. When you look back on it, the speed in which digital video technology has advanced over the past 20-plus years is staggering. I was shooting in HD by 2009 and now there’s 4K and beyond.
Although the technology is insane today, I do feel privileged having been about at the right age to get into digital filmmaking at the dawn of when the digital age was first taking off. My laptop was one of the first laptops you could edit digital video on. My camera was one of the first consumer, user-friendly digital video cameras. Firewire technology was brand new and helped make digital video editing possible. And the version of iMovie that I was using to edit my films on was the very first version of iMovie ever. When I did finally move onto Final Cut Pro, that was basically the very first version of Final Cut Pro ever. Yes, this was truly the dawn of the digital age and I feel so privileged to have been able to experience this dawning as it was happening in real-time. I mean, in a sense, I was a part of this dawning. That makes me feel kind of special.
I definitely miss those early days of digital video. It was easier to do but not too easy like it is today. I mean, today, anybody who has an iPhone can shoot and edit video. Everybody is a videographer. Everybody is a digital editor. Practically everyone has a YouTube channel. And although I guess this is good in some sense, I think the fact that it’s so easy means we get oversaturated with content, most of which isn’t worth our time to watch. We always look at the past through rose-colored lenses but I do think that those early days of digital video, shooting on MiniDV, editing on a PowerBook laptop with Firewire technology and iMovie software, Final Cut Pro, or even Avid … I do think it was a special time in technological history and maybe even in our evolution as a human species.
OUTRO
All right, everyone, that concludes episode #9 of THE BURNZO CAST. I do hope you enjoyed this episode and maybe if you were making little DIY movies 20 years ago like I was, then perhaps you could relate to everything that was discussed in this podcast. If you want to learn more about my amateur movies and my early days of digital filmmaking, be sure to check out my book Garage Movie: My Adventures Making Weird Films available on Amazon.com. More episodes to come and please do me a flavah. Be well. Take care of yourself, BURNZO NATION!
…
MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies! and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, MY RAGING CASE OF BEASTIE FEVER, JUNGLE F’NG FEVER: MY 30-YEAR LOVE AFFAIR W/ GUNS N’ ROSES and I TURNED INTO A MISFIT! Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.
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PROXOS IN THE PLEX: A Goldeneye 007 N64 Retrospective
100 DAYS of ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time
I USED TO BE A GAMER: The 8-bit Nintendo Years
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie (a story about Burns’ recurring nightmares featuring Charlie Chaplin)
Remembering That Time I Tried to Stop a Shoplifter at the Wrentham Outlets
Making Your Good Writing Great
No-No, Learn to Love the Rejection: Some Sage Advice for Writers in Search of an Agent or Publisher
The Story Behind Supermarket Zombies!
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