I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, went to college in Wilmington, North Carolina (UNCW), and received a degree in marketing.  After moving all over the southeastern U.S. and even doing a short 1 year stint in Seattle, I now live in Charleston, South Carolina.

I have been interested in audio and video for a large part of my life.  When my family purchased a Sony BetaCam back in the 1980’s my siblings and I used to take it a try to make videos with it.  We’d shoot my band playing, silly skits, etc.  This was quite a task back then because we had no way to edit anything.  You pretty much had to get everything right on the first take.  You couldn’t even rewind the tape in the camera.  You could only plop it in the BetaMax player and watch what you caught.  Later on we bought a VHS deck and we could then bounce tracks back and forth between it and the BetaMax which wasn’t exactly a NLE but it did allow us to do some “editing.”

We used to do the same thing with audio.  I was in a band and played keyboards.  Nobody I knew had a multi-track recorder so we would take two tape decks and get creative with them.  Record your bass track on one tape deck, play it back and play another track along with it and record that onto another tape deck….and keep repeating until your done.  After about 3 passes of doing that the first track would be so out of tune due to the differences in the decks speed that became quite humorous.

For me, the magic in shooting, whether it be film or video, is that moment when you get to see what you caught.  I often tell people it’s like fishing for crabs with a crab trap.  You don’t know what you have in it until you pull it all up on deck and dump it out.  Sure, you try to plan your shots and make tweaks to things just as a crab fisherman would bait his traps but sometimes you come up empty.  I’ve watched Deadliest Catch on Discovery!  It’s when you get back to your computer with all of your shots and dump it all out and look at what you have that’s magical.

Today I am just blown away by what is possible.  If you can dream it, you can make it.  We have never had this many tools and information at our fingertips and the ability to share ideas instantly.  The way the internet allows people to express their creativeness is truly powerful.  I have learned more this year just by simply following a handful of blogs and Twitter than I ever could have in a school-type setting.

Keep creating,

Anthony Spencer