I have switched to Apple computers for the most part when our family bought our first Mac in 2006. Ever since then I have seen computers as a creative tool. I learned to edit video on the Macintosh. When my dad's friend gave me an old copy of Final Cut Pro, I had so manny options and choices in an edit. Since I had come from a computer background, it was those early editing sessions that got me into video production. It was amazing to me that seperate clips could be put together to tell a story. For my first video, most of the fun in editing it was developing a soundtrack...
I took a lot of Christian songs and threw them together. I didn't know what I was doing but it worked very neatly. No tweaking was needed. Yet it looked like the music in the music video was driving the cuts when in fact I had edited the video without sound and then later dragged in music. I didn't know anything about music copyrights so I was free to experiment with any song we owned on iTunes. That is the reason it is blocked in Germany.
With the Sony DVD camcorder, I was able to offer help to friends who needed help putting a video together into a finished project.In my own little circle I had become the go to guy for video. It was a lot of fun filming.
I think filmmaking appealed to me because on the outside it is very simple, yet on the inside it can be very technical. We made a short about praying the rosary. Then later we made video about St. Dominic Savio. I edited the footage to look like an elaborate news studio report. We used a greenish/blue sheet for chroma keying out the background of our talent.
I acted as director. I wrote a script but let the talent improvise so that the conversation would be real. Surprisingly, they did a nice job considering my innexperienced directing ability. I also worked the camera where I made the mistake of making use of the zoom lever (which makes it very difficult to match the background in a greenscreen shot. I learned a lot from that project both from the actors and the editing. It was a very ambitous project. It was hard for the actors because they had to look into the sun. And it was hard because we had never done greenscreen before so it made it harder in the editing room. Also, rendering took longer than expected but it was a very complicated project with four layers of video an lots of keyframes (to undo those zooms I did on set). Also something happened so that I lost a good portion of work.
Backups are very important (yet we still don't have a solution to that). So after redoing what I lost I had an impressive video that we could be proud of. Whenever I direct I think of that first time and how much farther I have come since then.