Is that a Canon E300 Camcorder in your pocket..Or are you just happy to see me?

For as long as I can remember my family has always had a video camera. I mean, there is VHS tape after VHS tape in our lounge room to prove it! Every birthday, every christmas..I think it's fair to say that my father was a bit obsessed with figuring out how to use it, I do believe that the first tape has a lot of experimentation with zoom and the fade out (to black or white!!) features, or learning how to put a little bit of nifty type at the beginning of some event filming. He seemed like a veritable Steven Spielberg to me.

Canon E300 Camcorder. A bit like the one my dad had back in the day. Pretty cool.

Everything changed back in 2005, however, he took a huge step into the 21st century and upgraded to a new fandangled video camera. It would have been a quarter of the size and it recorded onto this tiny tape thing and he let me have a go at it! The next year came my school study tour of France and I decided I wasn't going to be one of the lame students who just took a camera along NO WAY! I was taking the video camera and I was going to document every detail of that trip.

Once we arrived home, very limited amount of editing took place and everyone was given a copy, except my French teacher - who we pretty much mocked the whole time. But even amidst what is said to be the "rise of YouTube and Google Video" (Austin and Jong, 2008) I never considered anyone but my friends and family watching what would now be called my amateur documentary.

I recently found this nifty little quote from this website - http://www.jstor.org/pss/3697358

"Anyone may accidently become a director, a scriptwriter, even a producer. Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with art. The only concern is to capture the world with a third eye (apart from the two naked eyes)....Suddenly, we realise the most mundane life is filled with surprises." (Digital Video Has Done What A Fool Can Do)

Unlike some amateur documentary makers, I had no social or political message in my film. I simply produced something as a keepsake, to visually represent the two weeks I spent with all my friends in our first overseas experience. Basically, I did it for the fun of it and I did find that some of the most surprising and funny parts where actually just us doing something mundane, like chatting on a train.

I think that the freedom of speech that is provided through the medium of digital video and documentary making is great! For example, type "amateur documentary" into YouTube and you can count 12 on the first of more than 7 pages. Now, I don't necessarily want to watch "Fat Food Nation", nearly 300 people have watched it and I'm pretty sure I can see Supersize Me for all those statistics. However, watching a "weird and wonderful movie" on somebody's brother is actually quite intriguing to me. So it is opening up a the potential for people to share their particular message or information, whether that be a critique of society or just something of comedic value, I think it is quite a liberating thing.