Home movie
A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation, or a special event, and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The vast majority of amateur film formats lacked audio, shooting silent film.
For other uses, see Home movie (disambiguation).
The 1970s saw the advent of consumer camcorders that could record an hour or two of video on one relatively inexpensive videocassette which also had audio and did not need to be developed the way film did. This was followed by digital video cameras that recorded to flash memory, and most recently smartphones with video recording capability, made the creation of home movies easier and much more affordable to the average person.
The technological boundaries between home-movie-making and professional movie-making are becoming increasingly blurred as prosumer equipment often offers features previously only available on professional equipment.
In recent years, clips from home movies have been available to wider audiences through television series such as Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV (1986 debut) in Japan,[1][2] America's Funniest Home Videos (1989 debut) in the United States,[3] You've Been Framed! (1990 debut) in Britain,[4] Video Gag (1990 debut) in France,[5] and online video sharing sites such as YouTube (founded 2005), that of users who want to share their home movies as user-generated content.[6] The popularity of the Internet, and wider availability of high-speed connections has provided new ways of sharing home movies, such as video blogs (vlogs) and video podcasts.
Omnipresence and controversy[edit]
Portability and small size of digital home movie equipment, such as smartphones, has led to the banning of such devices from various places, due to privacy and security concerns.
Pornographic movies of celebrities have been rumoured to exist for many years, but the ease of creating home movies on video has resulted in several celebrity sex tapes becoming available to the public, often without the permission of participants. The honeymoon video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee from 1998 was the first highly publicized example.[10]
Portability of digital equipment helps fuel other controversies as well, such as the incident on November 17, 2006, in which comedian Michael Richards got into a racist war of words with an audience member during his comedy club act.[11] Large parts of the incident were captured on the camera phone of another audience member and broadcast widely.
Home movies have played important roles in controversial criminal investigations. The prime example is the Zapruder film of the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, accidentally captured on Kodachrome film with an 8 mm home movie camera. The film became crucial evidence for the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination.[12] At first, only black-and-white enlargements of individual film frames were published, and the most gruesome frame was withheld. The public did not actually see the images in motion for many years. The first showing on network television occurred in 1975.