Life 3 Minutes At A Time

Old 8mm film (not tape) was shot on 40 foot rolls. A 40 foot roll would capture 3 minutes of fun-filled home movies. 3 minutes of movies to watch before having to put a new spool on the projector. 3 minutes of movies to shoot before having to reload the camera. Everything was done 3 minutes at a time - max!

A common feature of home movies is he frantic “I-don’t-have-much-time” wave at the cameraman. Time was quickly passing so you had to do everything really fast. Yet, life was more laid back in the pre-digital world. Ironic.

When videotape came around in the mid to late 70’s I remember hearing people complain that the videotapes were only 60 minutes long. Then camcorders came around and the length was even greater. Still people complained about needing more tape to make even longer home movies. Life was growing more frantic, but people figured they needed at least 2 hours worth of tape because their family was so interesting. They were all mistaken.

A phrase that has always struck me - and proven itself true time and again - is this:

“If everything is important then nothing is important.”

The point is that if you attempt to make every little detail the most urgent thing, then pretty soon it’s clear that nothing is really important because of our constant focus on everything. It’s true of capturing moments on film or video, too. Shoot everything, all the time and nothing is special. Shoot more rarely and those captured moments become more special.

Digital photography and digital video have altered our ability to capture anything, everything, all the time. Not since the advent of photography have we seen such drastic change. Cell phones can capture still pics or video. If something happens on a busy street corner it’s likely there will be dozens of recording devices capturing the moment. The event will be on YouTube within minutes. A blog or two will tell about it just as quickly.

It wasn’t always so. It used to be that life was captured in moving pictures 3 minutes at a time. Snippets of video were shot - mere seconds at a time before hitting the stop button. A 3-minute reel of home movies might contain shots of multiple locations, multiple relatives and a variety of different trips. 3 minutes. Capturing moments of an entire day, or week, or trip.

I need multiple gigabytes to contain my collection of still pics. If I shot video, I’d need terrabytes.

Life isn’t happening 3 minutes at a time today. It’s happening in nanoseconds so we need more memory, more storage - but we haven’t got enough time to look at it all. I can’t even catalog it all, much less view it.

Part of me wishes things were not so advanced. Part of me would like to get the family in the car and set about for a general area of the country. Take our time. Stop when we want. Check out something weird and unique. Take about four reels of movies - and capture a week long trip in 12 minutes of home movies. Forced to edit before shooting - not afterwards. Family narrative would likely fill in the gaps. Memories would recall stories not captured by the movie camera. Stories would be passed down and often repeated. Every time the movies were shown, the same stories would be recounted. The family would connect by remembering. And reciting the events of the past.

Not so much any more. Life isn’t happening 3 minutes at a time any more. Nanoseconds now measure time. Pictures and video are no longer rare events. We don’t drag out the projector and hang a white sheet from the wall any more. We don’t all gather around in a dark room to watch. We don’t worry about the mechanical flutter of the projector, or the film breaking. We watch video alone. We laugh by ourselves. We email the file or the link so we can virtually laugh with each other. We’re just as likely to share such moments with complete strangers on a blog (like this one) as we are to sit around with our own kinfolks.

We’re likely to insert a DVD that will play for hours. Within 10 minutes we’re whipped with seemingly senseless video of people doing nothing in particular. Watching the video isn’t special because shooting it wasn’t very special. It’s commonplace. And dull. Boring. It wasn’t always that way.