My First Movie; or, What Happens When You Don't Read the Manual

My Auntie Adelina says she never wants to start on page 1 of any instructions, she wants to jump in on page 18.
Me too. Or, rather, I often don't even consult the instructions.

Last August 21 (2008), I took my new camcorder to hang out with Lee on his 40th birthday. As is my wont, I had not even taken the manual out of its plastic, and, as you can hear, I figured the round red light on the camera's screen must mean the camera is not filming.
This sort of reasoning almost always works on my Mac, but the Canon designers figured a red stoplight would be a good choice to signal that the camera is recording...

So, for posterity--and to clean out my iMovie storage--here are the 25 seconds of my first filmmaking efforts.


My backward way of learning things is not very time efficient, but it serves me well, in its way. Figuring things out the hard way means I'm much less likely to forget them.

N.B. This learning style is more dangerous in some endeavors than others.