Let's Recap
I’ve been doing video recaps since 1999, starting with a church youth group visit to Washington D.C. in 1999. Since then, technology has changed, cameras have changed, I’ve changed - for the better!
I grew up with photography capturing my life, in the 80’s and 90’s images were the real deal. Capturing an event via a camcorder or phone was NOT as common as images, so my life had very little footage, and I have no real idea where that footage even is, and that struck a cord with me.
In High School technology for me was evolving and I really wanted to get into filming and editing because I wanted to capture moving life. To see it and hear it, to relive the atmosphere of it all, something I wish I had of myself when younger.
Still from a recap I made in 2019 with footage from a mission trip I took in 1999 that had never really seen the light of day until now.
DC/LA video made in 2000. Took hours upon hours to make, because of consumer technology of the time. But this was my first officially edited video.
It use to take hours, days to edit a video (NO JOKE), on a PC, downloading footage as long as the footage ran. 45 minutes of footage took 45 minutes to download, and that was IF it all captured in one solid chunk, which it never did. It was insufferable. But I loved doing it, I love capturing an event and watching it over and over with fun music, and looking back I realize I will watch a recap vs. watching all the raw footage or even images.
As I grew up recapping, (sounds like an addiction), evolved from youth group event recaps, to wedding recaps, to recaps of my child and always back to youth group / summer camp recaps. It’s made it so easy to relive fun things in the past without much trouble. And makes great #TBT’s and TikTok’s.
Recently (the past few years) I’ve been doing Sunday night youth group recaps of the High School gathering at church. Starting at 4PM, I capture the gathering through 5:30PM, then I took the footage and transferred it to my phone to edit in iMovie. It was done and posted around 6/6:30PM! The next few years it evolved into doing the same thing but on my computer, with a new song each week and an intro and outro. These would get posted to the youth group Instagram and YouTube. Sometimes it felt redundant, repetitive but with the way technology is these days it didn’t feel wrong to post so often.
It’s been fun to reflect on the evolution of editing with the same type of content, and it’s still exciting when I can recap an event, because it takes the best of what I captured and makes it a memory/snapshot of our lives, and that’s important.
Interview with my Grandma Evelyn (R) and her sister, Lillie (L) in 2012.
In March of 2021 my Grandma McGuire passed away. I had filmed her and her sister almost 10 years ago, capturing there lives, personalities and voices on camera. Since then both of them have passed away, and when my grandma passed away I wanted to do a small recap of her to share with friends and family. To show people how much she meant to so many and to show who she was and will remain.
Being able to recap her life is probably the most fitting use of a recap, and having that edited, short video to see as often as possible is something we can treasure forever.
As this is posted today my Grandma would have been 98 years old, September 3rd, 1923. Happy Birthday, Grandma!
Nowadays (man I sound old), I’ve made a career out of editing footage. And thinking back to how that idea of capturing life with footage struck a cord with me was an important moment, one I’ll never regret having.
- The Media Buff
Visit Eagle Students Instagram for more weekly recap updates.