The holiday movie season is approaching, and Keith Whitmer's production studio is shifting into high gear. Whitmer sits for hours in a room in Manhattan viewing scenes accumulated from a year of shooting, then more hours putting a movie together.
Whitmer is not an independent filmmaker. He is burning video CDs in his apartment to send as Christmas gifts to far-flung relatives -- his parents and sister in California and his brother in Atlanta.
And with this month's arrival, Whitmer and his wife, Jayne, are in production overdrive. Keith Whitmer tackles the video side of things, while Jayne Whitmer takes on the stills. More often than not, the production centers on their 3-year-old daughter, Olivia.
The Whitmers are part of a growing contingent of audiovisual hobbyists for whom the holidays simply are not the holidays unless the memories of the year have been fully digitized and the holidays themselves have been shot and reshot, edited and re-edited, viewed and reviewed, posted to a Web site or sent out as e-mail or CD-ROMs or even DVDs to relatives and friends.
The Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group, estimates that nearly 9 million digital cameras will be sold this year in the US, a 62 percent increase over last year. The group predicts that some 2.3 million digital camcorders will be sold this year, a 35 percent rise from last year.
Not everyone will use those gadgets to provide the raw material for a digital production to mark the holidays or other events. But those who do will often put a tremendous amount of work into their projects. They will sometimes spend weeks viewing, sifting, editing, and choosing and adding music and other effects. Yet many amateur film producers welcome the distraction from other demands.
And it's nothing like it used to be. As a teenager, Whitmer made movies with 8mm film. "It was quite a long process," he said. "The equipment was very bulky -- splicing, taping, winding, setting up the projector and the screen." Whitmer even recorded music on a portable cassette player and tried to synchronize the recording to the film.
"It took forever to get the timing right," he said. "Now I do all of this on the Mac and burn a CD, and let everyone else use their computer as projector and screen."
It isn't usually until after he has finished that Whitmer, 45, who owns a small advertising firm in Manhattan with his wife, notices the amount of time he spent. "It goes by quickly because you're so focused on it," he said.
Besides, Whitmer said, it hardly feels like work. "It's more a labor of love, because you have the people in mind that you're making it for," he said.
Whitmer's theme for last Christmas was the Terrible Twos. The film was about five minutes long, "an eternity when you are talking about a video on a computer screen," he said. The five minutes were culled from about four hours of tape.
For the sequel this year, Whitmer is still in the concept stage, but he is considering using David Bowie's song Changes to produce a short piece about how much Olivia has changed in a year and how much life has changed as a response to her needs.
Jayne Whitmer, 42, provides the analog reinforcement, shooting stills with her film camera. Once the holidays approach, she goes from one roll a week to two. She scans the pictures, crops them, prints them out and makes photo albums to send as gifts.
RSS