It took my fellow teacher Dan Caccavano seven hours to upload a video to You Tube this weekend. He started after dinner in the Marshall Island High School office and around 2 am he decided that it would be a good idea to just leave it overnight.
Such is the life on a coral atoll.
The movie is a little over six minutes long. I am no expert on computers, and I have no knowledge of kilobytes, megabytes or snakebites for that matter, but it seems to me that seven hours for a little over six minutes seems ridiculous. That is an hour to upload a minute. I guess more that a minute if you are trying to be exact, and as this is journalism, I suppose I should try. Let’s see, if the movie was six minutes and 20-some seconds then that is about 1.12 hours for every minute of movie uploaded. I don’t know if that is right, but what, you come to me for mathematical precision?
Cut me some slack already.
So that movie is part one of a five-part student-generated documentary series on a Shakespeare play being put on here by the high school. It is done every year and is organized by a volunteer group out of Dartmouth.
Dan is in charge of teaching kids how to edit movies, and make the documentary alongside the play.
I don’t see Dan too much anymore. He spends most days after school hunched over his computer screen, toying with clips and sound bytes, or instructing students who have never even held a camera how to counteract over-exposed frames.
This year’s play is “A Comedy of Errors,” so Dan falling asleep and drooling over his keyboard until 2 am while the screen cheerfully tells him that it will only be a few more minutes seems fitting. However, if you let me get philosophical for a moment, and if you made it this far into the column I doubt you have much choice but to just read on, maybe the seven hours is only appropriate.
In this country nothing is easy. It is the curse of a third-world country desperately trying to pull itself into modern contention in a few short years. Cell phones regularly drop calls, noting ever comes on time, and the internet moves like a snail on a frozen sidewalk. So Dan and his students making this movie was not easy either. There was a lot to learn. A lot of mistakes to take into account. I mean, when you are capturing and importing video for the first time there are bound to be mess-ups. Multiply this by about 20 high school students who have had very limited access to computers their whole life and you can see that there were bumps in the road.
They learned though, they got through it and now part one of their video is on You Tube for the rest of the world to see. Knowing your way around a computer is a vital skill in the developed world, and now these kids who worked will be able to show something online to anyone they want. They can say, “look, I did that.” Plus if people only could put up stuff they had to wait seven hours to upload, then maybe there’d be a lot less crap on the net.
And maybe if you added up all of the hours they put into it then seven hours uploading doesn’t seem so bad.
Dan is exhausted though, I think I’ll buy him a cup of coffee, oh and here is the link to the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akHfCEu_iDg.
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