"Big Noise" - 1989
The act of creating images and moving pictures has been with me for an excessively long time. It's interesting to weave back through history and revisit things that I did as a child and to see how they tie in to where I am at my current stage in life.
In my early teens, I was introduced to the PXL2000 - a cool little fisher price plastic black and white video camera that recorded on high bias magnetic audio tapes. My buddy Mike had it, showed me what it could do, and then he let me borrow it for a long time. The moment I captured my first grainy, black and white video on it, I was hooked. Over the year that I had it I started recording everything around me. One summer day, I picked up Fred, a frog puppet that I had won at a local fair, and had him sing to the radio. It was fate. I was instantly hooked on what I was doing - making a frog into Billy Joel, Elton John and Phil Collins.
That summer, I made music videos, I made fight scenes with my action figures. I carried that camera with me to school; recorded recess, and classes, and bus rides home. When I was home I'd plug it in and make more music videos.
Then one Christmas my parents gifted me a floor model VHS-C camera. My videos became color. I have countless hours of me at school, at lunch, outside, riding ATV's, off-roading, making mini-movies, making jokes, fake fighting scenes. On and on and on. Back then I wasn't worried about composition or anything like that - I was recording my childhood and my fun.
Then real-life got in the way and I graduated high school. The video camera broke. Things stopped being recorded. Suddenly, 10 years had gone by and I hadn't made any videos. But the desire was always there. Soon. Soon.
Years ago, I picked up a Flip HD pocket camera so I could record behind-the-scenes stuff for my Photography business. Having the Flip let me attach it to my scooter. To my Jeep. More playing. More experimenting. More documenting.
Then, when it came to doing one of the most important things in my life - proposing to my girlfriend Sara, I combined the love of video with the love of puppets. I think you might recall how that turned out.
In this video above, you can see the seeds being planted. You can see the history that exists that led me to the moment of making the "Muppet Proposal" a few years ago. I made that because I made this, decades before. Because I love doing it. Because it's part of me. Better or worse.
I've recently been converting dozens and dozens of old VHS tapes with all this stuff to the computer. Retracing my history. Amazed that these things are still part of my fabric.
It's a part of me that makes me who I am.