What got me into film?

When I was in grade four, my aunt and four cousins had moved into our house for a year and this particular year for Christmas my parents had gotten me a black and white Toys ‘R’ Us video camera. I spent all Christmas day playing around with it, and I eventually had come to the conclusion that I was going to invite each family member into my bedroom, one by one, and film them having an interview with me. For the last eleven years, each Christmas a video has been created and aired for the whole family right after Christmas dinner.

In my family, the Christmas video helps to unite and bring us together and has becomes a part of Christmas that we all look forward to each year. The video is broken down into two or sometime three segments. The first part is some kind of Christmas re-enactment of a popular culture reference. For example, one year we acted out “Twas the Night before Christmas”. Another year I compiled eight years of film and created a “Best of the Years” segment, where it began with a slide show of pictures of us revolving around Christmas throughout the years. After the slide show, I compiled funny answers to questions, or simply just contrasting how we started off with a black and white camera to a state of art camera. The second segment of the Christmas video is an interview portion, where questions are asked reflecting the past year, and what they wanted for Christmas this year. The last portion of the video is somewhat a new tradition over the past few years, where everyone is given a line from a song and I splice it all together to make our own version of the song. For example, last year we sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and another year we sang The 12 Day’s of Christmas.

One year my cousin Ryan was living in Whistler and did not come home for Christmas that year. We all decided that we would help bring Christmas to him, so we filmed the Christmas video two weeks early just so we could mail it to him to watch on Christmas. This year’s theme was we all had to dress up and pretend to be someone else in the family, and then our typical interview process. Even though Ryan was not with us that Christmas, the video made him feel as if he was and he did not get to miss out on everyone’s favourite part of Christmas.

Every year, the Christmas video has only improved from the years before, and each year everyone is trying to out do their last year’s performance. Throughout the years our technology has moved from the simple black and white Toys ‘R’ Us video camera, to an updated Toys ‘R’ Us colour camera, then this huge video camera my dad owned that I had to have attached to a VCR at all times in order to record. Then finally when I was in high school I bought myself a video camera that had the capabilities to attach to a computer and I could edit the Christmas video. This is when our Christmas videos were finally taken to the next level and anything became possible to recreate and have this professional finished look. After the video has been filmed, and Christmas dinner has been eaten; all seventeen of us pile into the family room to spend the next forty-five minutes sharing this time together as a family. This has become a yearly tradition like I said for the last eleven years and for my family, we look forward to the Christmas video over what Christmas presents we will be receiving that year. All it took was receiving a black and white video camera for Christmas one year to inspire my interest in filming and editing. This is one tradition that I don’t ever see disappearing within my family.


We Wish You a Merry Christmas from Leah Fendley