I love making Instagram reels and stories, that’s well documented, the tools are easy to use, and right there on my phone. Lately I’ve been going all far out with futuristic technology to generate them, but it occurred to me today that the likely reason i’m so into video creation and editing.
ladies and gentleman, the Game Boy Camera. I got one for Christmas in 1998 which would have put me in 7th grade, just living in a total golden age for video games. think about that Christmas: I got Zelda 64, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy Tactics and Resident Evil 2. imagine that stack of fucking classics… and I didn’t even mention Half-Life (or Pokemon blue/red). my god what a year for video games.
In 1998, the most affordable digital camera was this black and white, super low resolution joint that was attached to a Game Boy cartridge and went right into my clear purple Game boy color. the menus were all weird and avant garde, like a Wario Ware game, before Wario Ware was even a thing. you could even put your face in these little mini games, based on the first Nintendo hand held, the “game and watch”.
the point is, the fun in that thing was figuring out what you could do with it. I quickly learned the only way to shoot videos was via stop motion animation, so I made all of these little animated features, probably less than 30 seconds long with my action figures, and especially my South Park wind up toys (South Park was brand new). I made funny little South Park episodes, and was loving it.
that’s how it feels making videos with AI now, that fun of trying to figure out how to work within the limitations and make something cool. I’m having so much fun, it feels like i’m playing video games. I haven't even played video games in about 6 months, wow. I’ll get back to video games someday, but now i’m obsessed with making music for micro music videos. I think they’re fucking sick. If it were up to me they’d have 100k views, that’s how great I think they are.
Actually my little 1 minute music videos remind me of the introduction to namco fighting games like Tekken or Soul Calibur. Everything I make (music, video, writing) is reflective of the culture I came up in, I want to be like a DJ, mixing different parts of culture together like different records. That’s what art is, as far as I know.
