IAMT #12: Retro
but truly who's more deserving, of you and your spare time
Retro /ˈretrō/ (adjective)
imitative of a style, fashion, or design from the recent past
“Retro” is the name of this video editing project I’ve been describing for the past few months. It’s an interview-style home video which includes my high school friends of about a decade now. I’ve been informally recording them since ~2017.
The lot of us have spread further apart during the Covid years, further exasperated by some moving away for work. The one time a year I hope to guarantee seeing them is around winter, when we book a cabin not too far from home and go isolate with each other for a weekend.
There’s something really pure about the fun I have with them on these trips. The encyclopedia of inside jokes we have with one another span half a lifetime. We default to the different roles we were typecast in at various stages of friendship. Reaching high levels of vulnerability comes naturally; we’ve seen each other at lows and highs.
Not to say we regress, but on these trips, we load up on our vices. Sleep late, gamble, eat obscene amount of junk food/booze, mindlessly play games, etc. It’s not pretty, especially at the end of it. But the average level of focus and professionalism that’s demanded of us on a daily basis has definitely increased since we were rowdy teenagers. Simple days when we’re in each other’s company and disregard nearly all human responsibility have been minimized to these two to four days a year.
The annual end of year trip feels like the reward we all get to relish in for the collective effort put in to maintain this uncomplicated friendship. Referencing “It’s your friends who break your heart” one final time, this is part of the friendship luxuriating business.
This kind of video project is perfect under these conditions. Friendships with long timeframes and high certainty of consistency reassure me while I slowly build up a library of videos that will eventually be stitched together.
Prior to “Retro”, there was a different project I completed back in 2019 that we’ll call “Rosy”. At the time, I thought “Rosy” was my magnum opus, although now, it’s hard to get through the first 5 minutes without my face contorting from the embarrassment.
I rewatched “Rosy” for the first time in a while and can tell I made it from a place of genuine adoration for these people. The support system I have today didn’t really exist when that project started, so I know it must’ve mattered all that much more back then. It’s sappy as all hell.
Comparatively, “Retro” has a more acute focus on exposition; the previous video was shitting around non-stop and rapid-fire chops with the intent of making you laugh. “Retro”, in totality, is a little over two hours, double the runtime of its predecessor. The interviews have a guided pace, with a mix of serious and unserious questions/responses. You really get to learn more about whom the people in front of the camera are.
I chose this path forward for “Retro”, as I think it will be important to memorialize who my friends are at this specific point in time.
It’ll be valuable when we reminisce; they’ve shown me we’re in it together for the long run, after all.
made with love,
- chib
[en]: For technicals, I was considering devoting a whole other post to my video editing process, but that’ll come later, if ever. For a quick TL;DR, I used Davinci Resolve for the first time. I went from Sony Vegas in high school, to bootleg pirated versions of Premier, to finally what I hope is the last video editing software I’ll ever have to learn.
It’s unfortunate I can’t show really any of the video, since all of it has the faces of my friends in it. I can’t show the audio since we’re talking about personal stuff most of the time too. It doesn’t really make for a great “hobby showcase” post, which is another reason I talked more to the personal side of the project.