We went to our local school district’s annual film festivals last night. It featured entries from kids at two of the elementary schools, the middle school, and the high school. I will admit that the 20-second Lego stop motion animations got tedious after a bit, but overall, the creativity was impressive, and a few of the entries were quite good.
It made me think back to a media production class I took when I was in high school. For our final project—a 30-minute TV show—we had to check out a fancy video camera from the school, and to edit all of our footage together, we had to hook up a bunch of VCRs together. It was a laborious and annoying process, and the final product was pretty low-quality.
Now we are all walking around with excellent high-definition video cameras in our pockets and there is pretty decent editing software available for free that will run on pretty much any device. If I wanted to go about and make a film today, all of the basic tools I need are within arm’s reach.
I think it is really easy to get focused on all the ways that technology has wrecked the world and made life worse over the past few decades. While that is true, there still are cases like this where individual artists, writer, musicians, and filmmakers have so much more to work with.