2019 Retrospective

For the last few years, I’ve been clawing through the old phone-video-archive and compiling ten minute retrospectives. It’s a continuation of a project I started in 2005 and abandoned in 2007 when I had some data loss.

Part of this project is my desire to do my own form of scrapbooking, but I also strive to make them lively. There are some things intended to be inside references or only relate to a clique of people, but as often as possible I try to face outward and make it compelling for a stranger to watch.

For 2019, there were 15 hours of clips taken by my humble iPhone XR, with its Moment wide angle lens and Sennheiser Ambeo binaural microphones. That’s double a typical year, but in 2019 I experimented a lot with time lapse, and also made a habit of using videos to take notes. None of the “notes” videos made it into this compilation, but I’m considering cutting together another compilation from the year of my insane ideas.

There’s a good deal of recent local Detroit history hiding in plain sight in the older clips, too.

For most of these, I’ve been making ten minute videos for YouTube and one-minute edits for Instagram. For 2019, I made ten and five-minute versions, because I had the opportunity to screen the shorter version recently as part of WDET’s StoryMakers event at The Senate Theatre in Detroit.

My editing workflow isn’t very sophisticated. I literally drag the entire year’s worth of clips onto my timeline and then walk away from the computer for a day while Final Cut decides how to deal with it all. Then I go into a meditative state of focused, seemingly endless subtraction. I always think this process will be done in a week, but it usually takes two.

I have only one more retrospective video to finish before I complete the set and have something for each year starting in 2005. Since I edited the years of of sequence to keep myself interested, the unfinished video is 2016. Tune in later for that one.

When I decided to take this work up again in 2018, I didn’t stop to think about how much work it actually was. There were definitely moments where I had to step away because I felt like I was spending all of my present-day in the past. I turn 40 this year, and there’s definitely something mid-lifey about this project. Glancing at my playlist, I have a very measured and tangible sense of the the inexorable tempo of the march of time.

This project began before smartphones and social media as we know them today. In my attempt to document life, I’ve sometimes been guilty of disengaging from the present to go stand in the corner and capture the moment with my phone rather than being in the thick of it. There’s definitely a problem of presence in some cases. That’s why, as years go on, I’m less and less likely to document certain human interactions. I wonder how it will influence future videos. The perspective in them is shifting, but I’m discovering how as I go.

I also made the decision to not try to represent what really happened. There’s been some hardship and sorrow that I left out deliberately. I’m picking the flowers.

If you look through the years of the mid-2010s you’ll find quite a few clips that would have been a blip on my Facebook timeline in those years. I hope to give them new relevance by presenting them in this way. As cellphone etiquette evolves, I find myself less likely to bring out my phone to capture a moment and more resistant to putting everything on social media as it happens. I’ve always had a compulsion to document the world around me, though, so I hope that by waiting up to a year to present clips that it dulls any feelings of invasion of privacy.

This project has also been medicine for me. A few years ago, while making Switchboard Infinity and other shows with Erie Canal Theatre, my delicate creative artist spirit was burned by my own incorrect expectations of what success looks like and how things work. My twisted ego wasn’t a good look on me. So, part of the reason I took this on was to create something that has a real, personal connection to people I care about, rather than hoping to find an audience elsewhere, and to work on a large, complex project with no commercial potential, to actively expect a low view count and to make it anyway.

I hope this resonates with some of you, and I encourage you to put some effort into documenting your own life and world. Videos, photo prints, old-fashioned scrap books, journals, any of it. Once you create your story in the past it’s easier to picture what your future story could be.

Screening my 2019 retrospective at WDET’s StoryMakers event at The Senate Theater in Detroit.