I'm getting to be a pretty good liar.
It began innocently enough. I started using Apple's iMovie software to edit my camcorder footage about two years ago. I was really excited about the program's ability to slice, dice and rearrange the scenes. Once I'd edited out the boring, poorly lit and inaudible shots, I knew I had tightly edited, highly entertaining home movies that friends and family would actually be eager to watch.
You can't really blame me for the first bit of deception. I taped our two-year-old son riding a kiddie train. Unfortunately, he'd been cranky and uncooperative for much of the shoot. I edited out that unpleasant portion and used only the segments I'd shot after he cheered up.
True, my movie would no longer reflect reality. I had, in effect, rewritten history, violating the idea that a camcorder captures our real-life experiences. Still, I didn't think friends and neighbors would want to watch a two-year-old having a hissy fit.
Next, I edited together footage from three different shots: One that I'd filmed from inside the train car looking out the window, another I'd shot of my son's face next to me and a third I shot from the sidelines as the train rolled by. By cutting together these three sections of tape, I created what looked like a single ride around the tracks that had been professionally filmed with three different cameras. Of course, that impression was a lie -- but a harmless one, I was sure.
These days, I've lost all sense of video guilt. If I can create a great moment by shuffling around events, I'll do it. If a funny scene plays better when I drop in shot of a listener's reaction that wasn't even filmed the same day, I go for it. And by dropping a happy Vivaldi recording underneath the video, I can make a stressful, leaky-diaper, screaming-baby day seem like one of the most sunlit, joyful days on earth.
Everyone's home movies are selective, of course. Nobody bothers to film the quarrels, the whining or the boring parts of our lives. But programs like iMovie give us to tools to distort reality to even more ridiculous extremes. We're encouraged by the marketers to make Hollywood shorts out of our home-movie footage. But Hollywood movies are understood to be escapist fantasies, not a record of our real lives.
These days, friends and family really do like watching my (edited) home movies, and why not? What they see are hilarious, orchestrally accompanied, seven-minute highlight rolls. For the moment, I'm not losing sleep over it. I keep the original footage just in case my kids grow up and want to know what life was really like. But in the age of iMovie and Photoshop, increasing numbers of people are freely touching up their photos and movies, creating a past that never was.
On the other hand, maybe there's nothing wrong with that. We've got enough to worry about in the present and future. Maybe it's just as well we edit the past so that it, at least, looks rosy.
Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com.
