Thoughts on Video Journals

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the value of keeping a journal. I kept one off and on while I was working for the WHO in India a few years back. Going back and reading those entries, I really wish I’d written more. I have a few journals scattered elsewhere from throughout childhood, in different digital and non-digital formats that are hard to find and keep organized. (For example, I have no idea what happened to the pages I wrote years ago on my ole Apple IIGS, inspired by Doogie Howser.) Consistency of format is probably a necessity for easy archival, but paper and digital formats call to me equally.

More recently, Luke and I have talked about using video as a journal format. I’ve been doing it for about a week, limiting myself to short two minute segments each day that I journal. That means that even if I make an entry every day, two months will fit nicely on a DVD for easy archiving. Talking into a camera is a lot harder than I’d expected, but I’m looking forward to learning to be aware of and comfortable with my voice and mannerisms.

At the moment, I’m using a DV camera that’s recording right into iMovie, but I’ll record to tape during my trip to India. Idealy, this footage would all be stored online somewhere since the disk requirements are hefty for my PowerBook, but I’m not yet comfortable sharing the journal with the public on a video site such as Vimeo and I haven’t found anything else that suits my needs better.