Maccamp Fall 2002

On the weekend of October 19, 2002, the Portland Macintosh Users Group (PMUG) held their 35th annual MacCamp at Silver Falls State Park.

I was lucky enough to be able to take part in a new experiment, co-teaching an all weekend class on iMovie with Terry Shellenberger. This was the first time an entire cabin had been dedicated to one subject.

Terry taught how to shoot and edit movies, not how to use iMovie. He gave the students sequences to shoot, which unknowingly at the time, were designed to be interchangeable through the editing process. As each student’s mind started to whirl about what kind of movie they wanted to make out of the video they shot, along with the stock video Terry included on CD-ROMs, they began to ask “How do I duplicate a clip in iMovie?” or “How do I put new video over this sound?”

This allowed Terry and I to answer some questions generically to the class at large, and many more on a one-on-one basis. This in turn allowed each student to work at their own pace. We had ten people editing their movies at 2:30am on Sunday morning! I do believe the gaming cabin had long since retired.

We had a great group of students – Everyone was eager to learn, people helped each other out on their projects, there was a very high level of energy and synergy in the cabin during the entire weekend. Unlike my other two MacCamps, we had a meeting on Friday night to get to know all of the students, get a rough idea as to their level of comfort with iMovie and to spark their creative juices.

I believe the class was a resounding success. I took some footage of the MacCamp students (not just the iMovie cabin) and made a little music video for your enjoyment.

his movie requires QuickTime 6.0 as it is compressed with the MPEG 4 video compressor. The movie is 32 megabytes in size, so it may take awhile to load.

Double click on the movie itself to begin playing…