Whenever I visit my parents, I can always be sure that I will feel at home because my room is pretty much the same as when I left for college many years ago. My parents have done a little work – new carpet, new wallpaper, new desk – but things are more or less been left as they were, from the books about programming the Amiga on the bookshelf to the porn under the mattress. When I was up there last for Christmas, I decided it was time I admitted I owned a house and brought some of these things back home with me. Let’s face it: since I’m only there 5% of the year, there’s no reason my mom shouldn’t use the room as a sewing room.

Of the things I brought back, what I was most excited about – yes, even more than the Magic Eye book – were the videos I worked on in High School. Some history: the Minnesota Spanish teachers had a statewide arts competition, and one of the areas of competition was video. The only real rule was that the dialog had to be in Spanish; otherwise it was a free for all. At the time my friend Rob and I were cable access nerds who volunteered at Northwest Community Television, videotaping everything from sports events to “Tuesday Night Trivia”, a live trivia show. For an outcast nerd like me, this was a place to put a lot of pent up creative energy.

Our freshman year we decided to team up to do “Un Dia En La Vida De Robin Hood” (A day in the life of Robin Hood). For those of you who took other languages, the plot is pretty simple. Robin Hood (Me) needs to steal some gold from the local gold truck shipment for the poor. First he has to cross “The River” (a.k.a Meadow Lake) in disguise, but his fan club gives him away and he gets in a boat chase with the boat guards(?). On the other side of the river he intercepts the gold carriage, but the Sheriff of Nottingham (Rob) was secretly hiding so he could catch Robin in the act(??). Some Commodore 64 assisted sword fight action ensues(???), which ends predictably.

How can you not love something that has “Wacky Sax” as the credits music? You can’t. Don’t be hating.

I remember the day we brought the final copy in for the submission to the contest. For some reason I had to miss the first five minutes of Spanish class, so I gave the tape to Rob with very clear instructions this cannot be shown in class. Predictably when I returned they had already finished watching. The part that shocked me was that they were actually impressed with what we had done. There were questions about how we’d edited it together, and how we’d done this or that. It was the first time I’d put my heart into something and people said “hey wow, that was kind of cool.”

I realize this looks like typical YouTube fodder now. I could defend it by saying it was before computer video editing existed and all editing was strictly tape to tape (computer controlled within five frames of accuracy), but I’ll be honest: it does look pretty bad. What can I say, I was sixteen years old. The wonderful thing about kids and film making is that you’re basically giving them endless possibilities. The thing they have to learn for themselves is to learn from what they’ve done; to strive to be better.

Did I learn that lesson? I’ve got three more of these. I could post them all together, or I could stretch this out for another couple posts because this is the most exciting thing I have going on. Guess which one I’m doing?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 am and is filed under Life, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.