Making Movies the Mannie Gentile way:

Okay, that's a take-off on a wonderful Bruce Campbell title. If you're not familiar with Bruce he's famous for cult classics like the Evil Dead and other obscure roles. A few years ago he put out a fine book entitled "If Chins could kill: Confessions of a B movie actor".

At the time it came out I was in charge of a production crew at a public access television station in Grand Rapids Michigan. The book became required reading on how to make movies on the cheap and really fast, which was what we were all about. I headed up the MoLLIE project (Mobile Learning Lab for Information Education), the short story is: we'd arrive at a school with video and editing equipment and one week later we'd taught a classroom of kids how to write, shoot, perform, and edit their own curriculum-linked videos for cablecast.

It was a lot of fun and I found that I really liked making video.

Most of my stuff is posted on YouTube (search Mannie1952). Some of it is fairly serious or straightforward and some is just silly and fun. Here's a place you can go to see any of the films I've posted:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=mannie1952

Working at Antietam has been a real opportunity to gather and edit interesting (and sometimes even compelling) footage,

The video of the Antietam Illumination that I posted yesterday is an example of why I enjoy shooting and editing so much. That particular piece consists of footage harvested over a year and about two weeks of editing work.

I have two video cameras including a Sony VX-2100 (pictured below, which, sadly, is ill at the time and awaits full-time employment for yours truly before repairs can be explored)

Sometimes, as with the artillery piece that I'm currently doing for the Antietam website, I have to do voice overs. Here I am in my high-tech studio with a bedspread providing the sound dampening.

Once I get the footage I upload it to my computer (mac G5) and use the imovie program to do the editing. imovie is really easy and also quite aggravating. imovie is a very user-friendly but quirky program and requires a lot of cheating to get a final product.

It takes a lot of tape to make one video.


The results can be be very gratifying. And the cool thing is, sometimes you have a live audience!

Although I'll continue to concentrate on still photography for this blog, I do plan to
upload more Antietam and Civil War videos. I hope you'll enjoy them.

Stay tuned!

Ranger Mannie