The Lost Days of Summer Projects

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I feel like a theme that might emerge for me during the writing of these Summertime Funtime blog posts is the fact that we’re not very vacation minded in the US. This is somewhat evidenced in the way Miguel and I split the workload on Summer Project ’94 and Summer Project ’95. We would get together during the day when lighting wouldn’t be an issue, and shoot as much as we could. Then I would go deliver pizza while Miguel did test edits – we were using two VCRs with shuttle jog editing capability, so Miguel had to edit most things more than once. The main reason for this workload split was that Miguel was better at editing, and because Miguel was on summer vacation from college. I wasn’t.

But let’s move away from the vacation aspect of it for a minute. I’ve written about the Summer Projects before, so I don’t need to really get into it here. I think I’m more interested in trying to inspire people to do a summer project for themselves.

What prompted the two summer projects was that Sony had a video competition at the time. I don’t remember when the deadline was, but it made sense for Miguel and me to get started the moment he was out of college for the summer, and be done with the project with enough time to mail it, as in mail in a Super-VHS tape to Sony. I think it gave us about 4 to 5 weeks to shoot and finalize the edit. We never won, but given that we have those two projects to show the world… actually, we need to get good digitized copies of those and put them online.

I believe that the requirement was that the video be 20 minutes long. I don’t know if they allowed for longer videos or shorter videos. I just know that we went for about 20 minutes long.

If you have a group of creative friends, maybe you can take 4 to 5 weeks to shoot a 20 minute short movie, especially if you’ve never done a longer project like that. It’s a whole different beast than shooting a three minute sketch or vlogging. It’s worth it though. We don’t have the resources at the moment to actually hold a contest. Maybe that’ll be a future ATW summer project to hold a contest with some actual incentive to enter; you know, when we can hire lawyers and such. But we’re always happy to review your work as a blog post. First reason, we enjoy the work of other artists and like to support the creative community. Second reason, it’s a built in topic for a blog post to just review something.

Our Twitter info (as of this writing, I’m checking in on Twitter more, but Nathan will probably get back into it soon):

Chris - https://twitter.com/AccordingToWhim/

Nathan - https://twitter.com/ATWGamesTX

Nathan and Chris - Spending Summer 2019 being as reflective as their sunglasses.

As a quick aside, we did have a Summer Project ’97 of sorts (as long as you consider winter to be summer). It wasn’t quite the same situation, but in May of 1997, Miguel and I decided… ok, in May of 1997 I decided that the show needed to finally be on public access, and Miguel went along with it. Unfortunately, that was a lot of our work dynamic when there wasn’t a contest driving us. We had a lot of sketches done that could create the first five episodes with a few new segments shot. Then we were mostly out of material by the end of the year. This prompted me to start writing an episode that would be a full storyline with ideas contributed by me, Miguel, and Brian (aka Episode 6 of “Sniffles (sniff)”). Unfortunately, that episode is not online at the moment, but here is an odd outtake from those sessions. 

This also gave us our first chance to work with Bill Stober who worked on the Fort Worth public access show, The Dwight Williams Show. As I said, that’s not uploaded yet, but here’s a clip from his show.

Episode 6 of “Sniffles (sniff)”, more than any of the other episodes, felt more like a summer project, because it was a full storyline that came in at about 27 minutes, and had to be shot with focused intention.

I would experience that focused intention again, with Nathan, during what could be called Summer Project ’09 (as long as you consider April summer), which was a much longer project in terms of overall time, but was largely shot in the course of a week, with follow up work done later. This was According To Whim – Season Two. It was six episodes worth of a season with a continuing storyline. This was the second time I got to work with Bill Stober.

So here’s to having fun with your summer, but maybe even taking a few weeks to create something. When you create a twenty minute movie you not only create the movie, but you create memories and stories to tell.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who doesn’t miss shuttle jog editing in the least. Nostalgia can only go so far.