Action!
Title
Action!
Description
An activist video about the Metro Days of Action, which uses camcorder footage contributed by ten different participants.
Creator
Jonathan Culp
Source
Jonathan Culp
Date
1997
Contributor
Jonathan Culp
Rights
Jonathan Culp
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Type
Video
Context
My first "activist video" was inspired by my horror at the ambitiously amoral Ontario Premier Mike Harris, who to this day I would very much like to see boiled alive in tar.
During the Metro Days of Action - October 25 & 26, 1996, culminating in the largest protest march ever in Toronto - I was struck at the sheer volume of camcorders, which had only recently become a hot consumer item. What could be done, I thought, if these amateur videographers pooled their resources?
So, after the fact, I managed to get a notice published in NOW Magazine asking for raw footage, and about ten people got back to me with their varied documents of the protest. I then set about figuring how to give all this random shaky stuff some kind of form.
Still developing my chops as an editor, I decided to structure the video around a single speech, a particularly compelling piece of oratory by Joan Grant-Cummings, then president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. I used her words as a frame off of which I hung images that both reflected on her words and encapsulated the broad variety of creative actions that were undertaken that weekend.
Simple though it may have been in concept, the technical process was unique to its time. One of the videographers I got in touch with, Vic Garbutt, was the coordinator of the Bain Co-op closed circuit TV station, and he offered his non-frame-accurate VHS editing facilities to complete the video. To save studio time, I actually edited the audio *first*, running sound from my living room VCR to my Yamaha cassette 4-track recorder. I then edited the picture to the sound, again without precise frame control, so that I had to avoid images with sync audio wherever possible. This maddening process involved a great deal of logging and timing and fussing ahead of the fact, using techniques I had learned while working in post-production at Vision TV.
The video debuted at Symptom Hall on the one year anniversary of the protest. Shortly thereafter I brought the tape to an open screening at U of T, and that night I met what would become the nucleus of the Toronto Video Activist Collective.
During the Metro Days of Action - October 25 & 26, 1996, culminating in the largest protest march ever in Toronto - I was struck at the sheer volume of camcorders, which had only recently become a hot consumer item. What could be done, I thought, if these amateur videographers pooled their resources?
So, after the fact, I managed to get a notice published in NOW Magazine asking for raw footage, and about ten people got back to me with their varied documents of the protest. I then set about figuring how to give all this random shaky stuff some kind of form.
Still developing my chops as an editor, I decided to structure the video around a single speech, a particularly compelling piece of oratory by Joan Grant-Cummings, then president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. I used her words as a frame off of which I hung images that both reflected on her words and encapsulated the broad variety of creative actions that were undertaken that weekend.
Simple though it may have been in concept, the technical process was unique to its time. One of the videographers I got in touch with, Vic Garbutt, was the coordinator of the Bain Co-op closed circuit TV station, and he offered his non-frame-accurate VHS editing facilities to complete the video. To save studio time, I actually edited the audio *first*, running sound from my living room VCR to my Yamaha cassette 4-track recorder. I then edited the picture to the sound, again without precise frame control, so that I had to avoid images with sync audio wherever possible. This maddening process involved a great deal of logging and timing and fussing ahead of the fact, using techniques I had learned while working in post-production at Vision TV.
The video debuted at Symptom Hall on the one year anniversary of the protest. Shortly thereafter I brought the tape to an open screening at U of T, and that night I met what would become the nucleus of the Toronto Video Activist Collective.
Original Format
VHS
Duration
7:43
Director
Jonathan Culp
Player
Files
Citation
Jonathan Culp, “Action!,” Alternative Toronto, accessed November 21, 2024, https://www.alternativetoronto.ca/archive/items/show/400.