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It's interesting to see kids filming and editing video, then uploading it on the web. It's home movies for the new millenium, but with DV downloading, editing, text scrollers with music overlay, and uploading to YouTube. That kind of blows my mind because kids can do that yet I don't know how to. Granted, I don't have the free time which I know they do, and in my youth I spent that time doing other creative things that young-adults around me wouldn't, etc. It's all relative, but interesting.

Some friends of mine did manage this with 20th-century technology. They must have been about 10 or 12 (it was before I knew them), which puts it long-enough ago that home VCRs were relatively new, let alone camcorders. Their parents hired them a VHS camcorder for a few weeks over the summer holiday -- it was as big and about as unwieldy as a labrador retriever, and heaven knows what it must have cost, even just to rent. And, using only that and their home VCR as an editing suite, they put together a horror film. There were no special effects more advanced than a hosepipe for the "during a rainstorm" scene -- the central monster stayed off-screen -- but it was a genuine film with a script and a story and real cinematography and so on, all basically worked out from first principles by three kids in a few weeks. When, later in life, I eventually persuaded them to show me the video, they were terribly embarrassed by the rather mannered and un-Oscar-worthy acting, but I thought it was a fantastic achievement.

Today's kids would use their parents' hi-def H264 camcorder and a cheap computer editing package of a sophistication unavailable to Hollywood in my friends' era, but that's just taking out the spadework. The magic still comes from the kids' creativity, and there's no evidence that there's any less of that around than there was in 1982.

Peter