Home Truths?

Front matter

Home Truths?

VIDEO PRODUCTION AND DOMESTIC LIFE

David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett, and Maria Pini

Introduction

Since the first domestic video cameras were introduced on the market almost a quarter of a century ago, the opportunities for ordinary people to create their own moving-image representations have steadily grown. In the United States today, around 45 percent of households own video camcorders, while in the United Kingdom (where the research reported in this book was conducted), the figure is around one-third. The advent of mobile (cell) phones with video recording capacities and the “bundling” of digital editing software with standard home computers have led to video making becoming significantly more accessible, even ubiquitous. Meanwhile, YouTube and similar sites have made it much easier for people to share and distribute video to both known and previously unknown audiences.

Yet despite its increasing scale, there has been very little academic research on this phenomenon. This book arises from what we believe is the first large-scale social research project to explore domestic and amateur video production. Our research, which took place between 2005 and 2008, covered two main aspects. First, we looked at a series of amateur video making communities, ranging from skateboarders to amateur pornographers, and from groups of young men creating “spoofs” to share online to well-established clubs of elderly film and video makers. These were “serious amateurs,” for whom video making was a sustained leisure-time pursuit involving sometimes considerable investments of time and money. In addition to an online survey, we conducted a series of in-depth case studies, using interviews and observations, as well as viewing a large number of amateur video productions. We have published our account of these “camcorder cultures” elsewhere (Buckingham and Willett 2009).

While they are interesting to study, such amateur groups are obviously unrepresentative. Very few of the millions of people who now own video cameras are likely to engage in video making in such sustained and dedicated ways. In most cases, the camera is likely to be used only occasionally, perhaps on special occasions, or simply when the opportunity arises. For much of the time, it may languish unused in the cupboard or under the bed. In the terms provided by the sociologist Robert Stebbins (2007), most domestic video making is more a matter of “casual leisure” than “serious leisure”: it is intermittent, spontaneous, even haphazard, rather than being a committed and regular practice.

In most cases, these everyday uses are also likely to be confined to what Richard Chalfen (1987) calls the “home mode”—that is, the use of media to represent the private world of domestic life. Here, we find people recording children’s birthday parties, family outings, and holidays or simply fooling around, playing with the camera. These people are not primarily interested in video making as an activity in itself: they may not care much about the quality or the aesthetic character of what they produce or about the technological potentialities of their equipment. They may well be concerned to capture events as clearly and even accurately as they can, but they are not particularly interested in improving their camera technique, editing their recordings, or showing their videos to a wider audience beyond family and friends. On the contrary, their interest is essentially in the content of what they record and in the possibility that video affords of being able to view that content again, perhaps at some point in the future when the people and places they have captured are only distant memories.

It was with the aim of exploring these more everyday practices that we undertook the second part of our research. Via a local school and a community center, we recruited a group of 12 households living in the vicinity of our university research lab in central London. This was a very diverse group, in terms of social class, family composition, and ethnic background. We gave each household a video camcorder to keep and tracked what they did with it over a period of around 15 months. This was clearly not intended to be a representative sample, but an in-depth,

Introduction 3 broadly “ethnographic” collection of case studies. We visited and interviewed members of each household on several occasions and gathered examples of the videos they were making. What the participants did with their video cameras was very diverse, and by no means was all of it confined within the home mode. In addition to the birthday parties, holiday footage, and playful messing about that we expected to find, we also gathered and were told about examples of video diaries, documentaries, comedy skits, and remakes or parodies of well-known films—as well as a great deal of material that defies easy categorization or indeed interpretation. This book is the result of our analysis of all the data we collected.

As we write, there is growing excitement both in academic circles and in public debate about the democratic potential of new media technologies, including digital video. We are apparently moving into a new era of “participatory culture,” in which power is passing away from the elites and multinational corporations that used to control the media and into the hands of ordinary people (for more and less cautious examples of this argument, see, respectively, Jenkins 2006 and Hannon, Bradwell, and Tims 2008). While we certainly sympathize with the aspirations that are often expressed here, we are very skeptical of the more grandiose claims about the impending democratization of media. There are various reasons for this. While some of these are beyond the scope of this book (see Buckingham 2010), the key issue that concerns us here has to do with the unrepresentative nature of the practices such enthusiasts tend to describe.

In this as in many other areas, cultural studies researchers are often keen to fix on areas of cultural activity that appear somehow subversive, radical, or challenging. Henry Jenkins’s (2006) work on “convergence culture,” for example, focuses largely on highly dedicated groups of media fans, who are busily appropriating and reworking existing media texts through their own creative media productions. This is fair enough, but as Jean Burgess (2006) argues, it may lead us to neglect the more banal, everyday ways in which people use media—which in the case of video making are typically much less cool and glamorous. Just as enthusiastic fans cannot stand in for media users in general, so dedicated amateurs do not represent “ordinary” people’s use of video.

Cultural studies frequently proclaims its interest in “popular representation,” but it has tended to ignore or marginalize the very forms of popular representation (and indeed se/f-representation) in which “the people” are routinely engaged. As we shall see in chapter 1, there has been some useful work on domestic photography, but very little sustained analysis of home movie or video making. In our view, researchers need to resist the continuing temptation to look elsewhere for the really cool stuff and spend more time engaging with the kinds of mundane, everyday cultural practices that we consider here.

In the following chapter, we provide a broad context for our discussion of home video making and discuss some of the theoretical perspectives and the previous research that have informed our work. We set the scene by considering the widespread dissemination of domestic video technology and the ways in which home video making is discursively “framed” in both popular and academic commentary. In general, we suggest, the home mode has been viewed pejoratively, as somehow insufficiently serious, artistic, or indeed politically challenging. We outline some academic perspectives that might enable us to understand what ordinary people do with video in a less dismissive and judgmental way.

Chapter 2 gives an account of the methodology of our project and introduces the 12 households that we studied. We draw attention here to some of the methodological and ethical issues raised by this kind of broadly “ethnographic” research and some of the dilemmas and choices that we faced in analyzing and writing up our data.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then present our analysis of the data. Rather than discussing each household in turn—an approach that we find leads to rather laborious reading—we have sought to pull out some broader themes that cut across our individual case studies. We recognize that this may place greater demands on the reader’s attention—rather like reading one of those nineteenth-century novels with an enormous cast of characters—and so we hope that readers will be able to refer back to the brief introductory sketches we provide in chapter 2.

In chapter 3 we provide an overview of the range of video making practices in the 12 households. We describe the different reasons and motivations for video making, the ways in which the technology was used, and how the participants defined their identities as video makers. Our main focus here is on the ways in which video making was accom-

Introduction 5 modated within the texture of everyday domestic life: where and when people used the camcorder; who in the household was able to use it and for what purposes; and how this related to broader divisions of power within the family (e.g., in relation to gender and generation), as well as to wider networks of extended family and friends. The discussion in this chapter thus relates to broader debates about the sociology of family life and specifically to recent work on the “domestication” of technology.

Chapter 4 focuses on the subjective experience of video making and its place in relation to emotion, memory, and personal identity. It begins by considering how people respond to the experience of seeing themselves on screen and, conversely, how it feels to be the video maker. It then moves on to look more broadly at the role of video making in relation to memory and the creation of “narratives of the self.” It explores how our participants used video as a means of freezing passing time for future viewing, how this future was imagined, and how video enabled them to create stories of their lives and to locate themselves in their physical and emotional world. This chapter builds upon theories of identity and subjectivity, including psychoanalysis, which have previously been used in relation to still imagery (notably domestic photography).

In chapter 5, we look more closely at how and what people learn about video production. We explore the different methods that our participants used to learn—for example, referring to published sources, seeking help from others, learning by doing, and imitating or drawing on mainstream media models. We consider the extent to which they planned their videotaping, whether they edited or engaged in other “post-production” activities, and what motivated them to want to make “better” videos. We then move on to look at what they learned—their understanding of the specific qualities of video as a medium, their awareness of “film language” and specific techniques (e.g., to do with framing and editing), and the different aesthetic and generic sources and traditions on which they drew. This chapter thus relates directly to contemporary discussions of “media literacy” and to broader theories of learning.

In our conclusion, we turn to what we suspect is the key question that will be nagging many of our readers. What is the social, cultural, and political significance of such apparently mundane activities? Is widespread access to “the means of media production” likely to precipitate a revolution that will overthrow dominant forms of media power? And if it is not, then what purpose and value does it have? Here, we want to contest the sense of disappointment that pervades much academic discussion of home video making—the sense that some potential challenge to the Powers That Be has somehow been defused or recuperated and that people have been distracted by trivialities. This is of course a familiar argument in discussions of popular culture, and in this context, it is accentuated by a view of the home mode as somehow necessarily conservative and supportive of a particular “familial ideology.” We hope that our analysis of these 12 households will provide a more nuanced and sympathetic account that does better justice to the contingencies of ordinary people’s everyday lives and the diverse roles that media play within them.

Chapter I

Media representations of home video making tend to portray it as a rather comical, even somewhat ludicrous, practice. Typical scenarios involve earnest fathers carefully staging “spontaneous” performances by their bored and reluctant children, friends and neighbors being lulled to sleep by endless screenings of family holiday films, or teenagers misguidedly emulating the dangerous stunts on TV shows like Jackass. The films themselves are generally deemed uninteresting, unimaginative, and unwatchable. At best, perhaps, enthusiasts might hope to capture some of the pratfalls and bloopers routinely featured on America’s Funniest Home Videos or the United Kingdom’s You’ve Been Framed—albeit with the wobbly camera work, poor framing, and uneven focus that are seen as indispensable characteristics of the genre. But is home video making simply an infinite wilderness of domestic trivia? Is it merely the last refuge of the annoyingly proud parent, the obsessive hobbyist, or the teenager vainly seeking to become the next Steven Spielberg? And in the face of these apparently obvious limitations, why do people obstinately persist in wanting to record their children’s birthday parties and holidays or in capturing hours of footage of family and friends waving and mugging for the camera?

In this chapter, we provide some pointers toward a less dismissive account of home video making. We review previous research on home movies, family photography, and home video, and we consider some of the broader claims that have been made about the significance—or indeed, insignificance—of such popular representational practices. Some of the research we address here is taken up in more detail in our discussion of our own data in chapters 3, 4, and 5. To begin, however, we need briefly to set home video making within a historical context and to consider how this practice is framed and defined within the commercial market.

TRACKING BACK

Although our research focuses on video making at the beginning of the twenty-first century, amateur movie making has a long history, dating back to the early t900s. Indeed, many of the key landmarks of early cinema—like those in the early history of photography—were produced by “gentlemen amateurs,” mostly wealthy middle-class men with sufficient time and resources to dedicate to what was essentially a hobby. “Home movies” became more widely available with the development of the 16 mm Cine Kodak and Kodascope Projector in 1923. The camera weighed about seven pounds and had to be hand cranked at two turns per second during filming. It cost $335 (by comparison, a new Ford car could be bought for $550). The first major period of home movie making began after 1932, when Kodak developed the Cine Kodak Eight, which used 16 mm film but only exposed half the film at a time, enabling double use. Other manufacturers emulated Kodak, with Bell and Howell developing the Filmo Straight Eight camera, which carried 8 mm film only. In 1936 Kodachrome color film was developed to meet the ongoing boom in home cinematography, even though the equipment and film costs were still prohibitively expensive for most. World War II halted major technical advancements for the domestic film market, and it was not until the 1960s that technological changes created significant opportunities for those interested in home movie making.

With the launch in 1965 of Kodak’s Super 8, an easy-load cartridge system that ran through the camera once, filming was made easier, while at the same time cheap plastic cameras were reducing the cost of home movie production. The 1960s also saw the advent of video, which allowed the filmmaker to watch a production back immediately, without having to send it away for expensive developing. In 1963, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog included the Ampex “home video” system, which included a large camera (weighing too pounds), TV monitor, and video recorder, all costing about $30,000 (including home installation). The first affordable portable video recording system was released by Sony in 1965—although its affordability and portability are certainly arguable. Aimed partly at recording programs from television, Sony’s CV-2000 “videocorder” weighed 66 pounds, videotaped in black and white, and cost $695 plus $40 for each one-hour reel of tape. The camera kit, which weighed 20 pounds, could be purchased for an additional $350, for a total of $1,085, including one tape. (Calculations based on the consumer price index indicate that with inflation, this would equate to over $7,000 in 2009.)

In 1967, the Sony DV-2400 Video Rover emerged as the first truly portable video recording system. According to the Sony product literature, “The Battery Operated Videocorder, in a comfortable, compact shoulder-pack, weighs a mere 11 pounds!” (SMECC n.d.). The Rover, or portapak, required separate playback equipment, had a maximum recording time of 20 minutes, and cost $1,250 (equivalent to over $8,000 in 2009). Panasonic and JVC followed soon after with their own portable models, eventually reducing the weight of the entire pack to 30 pounds.

In the 1970s, portapaks were mainly used by news agencies, as well as countercultural movements and avant-garde artists such as Nam June Paik. However, by the mid-1970s, home video making was becoming more economically viable, partly due to the introduction of domestic VCRs and the development of inexpensive half-inch videotape cassettes (with two main formats emerging, Sony’s Betamax in 1975 and JVC’s VHS in 1976). Sales in film cameras dropped dramatically with the introduction of cameras that could be attached to VCRs, although until the early 1980s, video making required separate camera and VCR devices. In 1982, Sony introduced a professional camera, the Betacam, which was both a camera and a recorder (or camcorder). This first camcorder was used primarily by news agencies, as the Betacam videotape recorder cost up to roo times the price of a consumer VHS machine. In 1983, Sony released the first camcorder for domestic consumers, the Betamovie BMC-100, weighing just 5.5 pounds and costing $1,500 (equivalent to $3,230 in 2009). Sony’s advertisements claimed:

Simply pop in a standard Beta cassette and you’re ready to shoot continuously for up to 3 hours and 35 minutes. Without carrying an awkward separate recorder. Without getting tangled in wires and cables. And without being weighted down by heavy equipment. . . . Betamovie takes all the trouble out of making home movies and gives you all the fun. (Total Rewind n.d.).

In just two years, from 1981 to 1983, home movie production shot up, with 6 percent of U.S. households reporting owning a video camcorder in 1981 and 28 percent in 1983 (Chalfen 1987). During this time, JVC developed the compact VHS format (VHS-C), which was designed for more portable VHS players and was eventually used in the first JVC camcorder in 1984, the GR-Cr. In 1985, Amstrad developed the first lowbudget camcorder, the VMCroo, which cost $400 (equivalent to $800 in 2009) and weighed just under 2 pounds. Cheap and simple camcorders were even developed for children as early as 1987, with the Fisher-Price PXL-2000, priced at $99 ($187 in 2009) (LabGuy’s World n.d.).

In spite of these developments, camcorders were still significant financial investments for the average household. Issue One of the United Kingdom’s Camcorder User magazine (Spring 1988) listed the average selling prices of a camcorder as around £1,100 ($2,035, equivalent to about $3,700 in 2009). Numerous advertisements in this issue offered o percent finance deals for camcorder purchases, and one article discussed negotiating with sellers to have a two- to four-day trial period, describing the purchase of a camcorder as “an awesome task” that “can be a very frustrating experience . . . and a very costly one if you make a mistake!” (Hi- Spek Electronics 1988). Clearly, camcorders were not yet for the average consumer.

The next significant technological breakthrough was in 1995, when the first digital camcorders were introduced. More than 50 companies had agreed on a DV tape format the previous year, and these first camcorders released in 1995 were aimed at professionals. In 1996, the digital camcorder hit the amateur market with miniDV tapes that allowed transfer to computer hard drives via Firewire or USB. This would lead to various digital formats, including Digital8, DVD, micromv, hard drive, and solid-state (flash) semiconductor memory. In combination with Firewire technology, “bundled as standard” digital editing software on home

Understanding Home Video II computers brought sophisticated and good-quality filmmaking and editing within reach of ordinary people.

In 2000, video-related sales in the United States grew by 15 percent, with total sales of $3.3 billion. Prices continued to drop: from 2001 through 2005, the average unit price fell from $423 to $319 (Consumer Electronics Association 2006). In 2005, disposable camcorders were available for just $30 (plus a $12 processing fee). Camcorder sales rose 11 percent to 5.9 million units in 2007 and were forecast to rise another 4 percent in 2008 to 6.16 million (Consumer Electronics Association 2008).

The turn of the century also brought video to other platforms such as mobile (cell) phones and still cameras. In 2000, the first mobile phones with built-in cameras were launched, followed shortly by the development of phones with built-in video recording facilities and large memory cards. By 2004, camera and video came as standard on new mobile phones, and in 2007, 87 percent of camera phone owners reported using the camera function on their phone (PMA Foresight 2008).

The distribution of video footage was radically transformed with the emergence of free video sharing sites, particularly YouTube, which was launched in December 2005. YouTube was an instant success: during its public preview the month before the official launch, cofounder Chad Hurley claimed that YouTube was moving “8 terabytes of data per day through the YouTube community—the equivalent of moving one Blockbuster store a day over the Internet” (Market Wire 2005)—although clearly much of this material was not produced by amateurs. Numerous video sharing sites followed, some of which promised to distribute advertising revenue to contributors, and Google ultimately bought You- Tube for $1.65 billion in October 2006, less than a year after its original launch (Geist 2006). News stories suggest that in January 2008 alone, “nearly 79 million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the US, watched more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube” (Yen 2008), while the number of videos on the site is rapidly approaching one hundred million.

These technological developments have undoubtedly made video production available to far more people. At present, video comes standard with mobile (cell) phones, costing as little as $50, as well as with many digital still cameras. Camcorders (with memory cards) cost as little as $90 and weigh less than 0.25 pounds (compared with the very first $1,500 camcorder, equivalent to $3,230 in 2009, which weighed 5.5 pounds), while the Flip camcorder, which plugs directly into a computer (without a wire), is the size and weight of a small digital still camera and costs around $roo. Yet with the availability of video facilities on so many different platforms, it is difficult to assess current levels of video making. While the technology is undoubtedly available to more and more people, questions remain about whether more videos actually are being made; who is making them and for what purpose; and whether different kinds of things are being videotaped, edited, and distributed than was the case in earlier decades. Video appears to be ubiquitous, to the point where it has become a taken-for-granted aspect of everyday life for many people, yet there has been relatively little systematic analysis of what this entails or, indeed, of its consequences.

FRAMING THE HOME VIDEO CONSUMER

Anyone who uses—or even considers purchasing—a video camera is bound to encounter a large amount of advice of different kinds. Family members, friends, and salespeople are likely to offer more or less helpful suggestions, but beyond personal contact, there is a whole world of advice literature in the form of manufacturers’ publicity materials, handbooks, consumer and hobby magazines, television programs, and Web sites aimed both at novices and more experienced users. Such material typically offers quite prescriptive ideas about what to film, where to film, who to film, and how to film. While it is certainly diverse, it all serves to define and construct the meaning of amateur video making in particular ways.

Elsewhere, we have undertaken an extensive analysis of the discursive construction of amateur film and video making within books, manuals, consumer magazines, and other material, dating from 1921 to the present day (Buckingham, Pini, and Willett 2007). While much of this material is implicitly targeted at the “serious amateur” or hobbyist rather than the casual user, it generally assumes that “personal,” family-oriented films are likely to dominate. Thus, in his introduction to Amateur Cinematography, published in 1962, Bordwell writes of amateur films:

These films are a faithful record of our lives. Big events and small have been telescoped into a few vivid moments, which we can experience again as often as we wish. Intimate family reunions or crowded public meetings; the back garden or a panorama of woods and mountains; scenes from childhood, from holidays at home and abroad—it’s all there, only needing the projector to bring it to life. (13)

Likewise, in Kodak’s How to Make Good Home Movies, written in 1966, the authors assert, “Most [film-camera] owners are not at all interested in using their cameras for subjects other than purely personal films of family and friends” (Kodak 1966, 5). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the home mode continues to be identified as the central function of amateur film and video making. Alan Cleave (1988), for example, provides a typical list of subjects for filming, including weddings, family holidays, sports events, and children’s birthday parties; and the same categories routinely recur in subsequent handbooks and manuals. More recently, Steven Beal’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Home Videos acknowledges that many people buy camcorders for one reason: to document their children’s lives as they grow up. . . . Never before in human history have we been able to record and document with such accuracy the most important events in our

This emphasis on the home mode, or at least on the private and personal nature of video making, is also strongly apparent in marketing pitches. A Sony advertisement from 1991, for example, attempts to entice younger consumers to buy smaller camcorders for their holidays:

Something happens between the milestones. Between the weddings and the birthday parties. It’s called the rest of your life. (quoted in Baum 1991) A similar emphasis is apparent in a more recent example from 2007:

Your trip to Paris. Your child’s first steps. College graduation. Life is full of moments that are well worth remembering. There’s no better way to capture those moments than with a Sony Handycam® camcorder. (Sony Electronics

Even so, the material we have analyzed is also concerned with distinguishing between the serious amateur, the enthusiast who invests in technology and creates “artistic” finished products, and the everyday user, who owns relatively inexpensive technology (with no accessories) and does not plan or edit his or her films. Everyday users are typically identified with the home mode in its crudest and most unreconstructed form: their video cameras are used simply for keeping “records” of family life. By contrast, most of the books and consumer magazines are addressed to readers who are aspiring to move (or are in the process of moving) from being everyday users to becoming more committed amateurs and hence have an interest in improving their practice (and in investing in more expensive equipment). It is through the process of “othering” the everyday users that this key distinction is created and sustained: it is always others who are uncreative, who do not plan their filming, and who bore their audiences with poorly shot, unedited family movies.

Thus, even when it comes to making “family films,” readers of these manuals and magazines are repeatedly urged to be more adventurous and creative. For the serious amateur, the making of such films is more than simply a matter of neutral record keeping. In order to create an accurate picture, the filmmaker must plan carefully so as to capture “typical” actions rather than random events. Readers are urged to analyze professional filmmaking practices, learning and applying “film grammar” and techniques (such as the “rule of thirds,” the “180 degree rule,” and continuity editing), as well as paying close attention to camera angles, lighting, storyboarding, and scripting. Editing is consistently identified as a defining characteristic of “good” amateur filmmaking. Amateurs are repeatedly encouraged to cut out irrelevant shots and to be ruthless about discarding film that does not progress the narrative: the aim is to create films that are more interesting for audiences and, like commercial films, tell a story. Although realism is consistently held up as the preferred aesthetic of amateur film, considerable attention is paid to the ways in which filmmakers need to shape and construct events in order to create the illusion of realism and spontaneity. Readers are urged to cut

Understanding Home Video I5 out shots that show people hesitating, “acting up,” or looking directly at the camera.

The discourses of these publicity and advice materials clearly show the continuing importance of the home mode, but they also reflect a broadly dismissive attitude toward it. The serious amateurs at whom they are targeted are implicitly conferred with a degree of creativity and social distinction that differentiates them from the naive or untutored home video maker. Nevertheless, as Richard Chalfen (1987) points out, the rules and injunctions contained in such texts are almost entirely at odds with what the large majority of home movie makers actually produce: even if they are aware of such aspects of “good” filmmaking (as they are surely likely to be from their own everyday consumption), they nevertheless fail to apply them to their own productions. Likewise, as we shall see in chapter 5, hardly any of our participants consulted such texts in seeking to learn more about video making, and indeed, few of them were sufficiently bothered to attempt to emulate “professional” (or even “serious amateur”) standards. This was not, we would argue, because of ignorance or laziness: it merely reflects their rather different aims and motivations.