CLASS OF '88, THE MOVIE

Publish date: 2024-08-05

To an outsider, it seems at first like an especially aimless teen

exploitation flick.

Kids wander around, making silly faces. There are shots of screaming

sports fans, a victory celebration, students yawning, studying, not

studying. There's no plot and little sense, but a lot of rapid

crosscutting and music by Aretha Franklin, Timbuk 3 and Rem. It's

low-budget, too. Even when the kids talk, you often can't tell what

they're saying.

Is this, then, a home movie from Mars? Not exactly. It's the 1987

video yearbook for Staples High School in Westport, Conn. None of it

will make any sense to someone who was not a senior there, but no doubt

every scene has meaning for those who were. In any case, the video

expertly captures the semi-joyful, semi-depressing mood of senior year.

That's one way to do it. Another is furnished by Hendersonville High

School in the Tennessee town of the same name. The production quality is

a touch smoother here, and the special effects -- screens divided into

four segments, trick shots, floating graphics -- are so slick as to be

literally dizzying.

This time, a narrator tells you what's happening in relentlessly

upbeat and cliche'd fashion: "A year that had something for everybody

... the kind of night memories are made of ... what most of us got out

of 1988 was what we left with -- a great education." If attending this

school was such a universally profitable experience, William Bennett

should hold them up as an example.

Whatever format is used, the video yearbook has begun to make an

impact. While not designed to supplant the printed version (after all,

you still need something to have your pals scribble lewd or sentimental

comments in), its proponents call it a perfect complement.

"A video yearbook brings those black-and-white photos to life," says

Robert Levitan of YearLook Enterprises. He's been producing them on a

commercial basis for five years, which makes him the industry's most

prominent veteran.

"It lets them move, gives them color, gives them sound. It creates a

more potent, more realistic memory. Plus, it's an educational project

that is particularly appropriate for today's students."

While a few high schools and colleges have been informally producing

their own video yearbooks since the technology became available a few

years back, the commercial market is just getting underway. A handful of

companies already are working on video yearbooks, and many more are

considering it. The primary reason: More than half the nation's

households have VCRs, and the video yearbooks' $20-$40 price tag is

within reach of most of them.

Quality is a different issue. Since the field is so new, there are

no established methods. Should students or professionals shoot the film?

Is slickness or authenticity the goal? Does it matter if one school's

video looks much the same as another's? After all, printed yearbooks

from different schools look much alike.

Three companies that exemplify different approaches are Levitan's

pioneering YearLook, which is headquartered in Durham; Jostens in

Minneapolis, the nation's largest producer of printed yearbooks; and

National Video Yearbooks in Nashville, which intends to make its way by

selling franchises.

While a student at Duke six years ago, Levitan, now 27, produced his

first video yearbook. YearLook, which included Staples among its clients

last year, currently is creating videos for 40 East Coast high schools

and colleges. Next year, it's shooting for 70.

At each school, YearLook trains students, who then do all the

filming themselves. "That makes it more authentic," says Levitan.

Moreover, "it's a unique opportunity for students to gain experience in

this new medium. Young people today watch so much television. They're on

the passive end. Producing a video yearbook is one way they learn how to

communicate by using the media instead."

YearLook does the post-production work -- editing, special effects,

duplicating, packaging. It then either sells the tapes to the schools,

which markets them to students, or sells directly to the kids. Final

price for the 20- to 60-minute tapes: $20 to $40.

The second company, National Video Yearbooks, soon will finish 15

yearbooks (including Hendersonville's) for high schools in its home

territory of middle Tennessee. For next year, their first franchise, in

Southern California, already has eight or nine clients. The second

franchise, in Phoenix, was just sold. Others are under consideration.

In contrast to YearLook, filming here is being done by the

franchisees themselves. What about the valuable hands-on experience for

the students?

"We started out that way," says founder Jim McCarthy. "We didn't get

the quality we needed. They start out shooting an awful lot of stuff,

but by the time spring gets here, they get tired. We had one school

where the principal wanted the drama department to do this. We got some

footage in, and it was only of the kids in the drama department."

Share this articleShare

Anyway, he asks, "You know how many kids you're helping? The kid

with the camera. It's far more important to produce a quality video for

all the kids and all the parents than it is for one or two or three kids

to get the experience."

National Video's franchisees will pay the company a flat fee for its

editing and production work, and also will pay a chunk for each tape,

which will be resold to students for $29.95. Franchisees will adhere to

a strict schedule of what to get -- how many classroom scenes, how many

football shots, etc. While there's an allowance for candid shots, the

style -- in contrast to the free-flowing Staples effort -- is relatively

rigid. McCarthy calls it "the cookie-cutter format."

The third company, Jostens, produces printed yearbooks for about

half the nation's 25,000 high schools. It is determined to enter the

video market with a splash. Marty Allen, the company's director of

product development, says the number of schools that will be

participating in the debut video season next year ranks "in the

hundreds."

Jostens plans to give all its schools the cameras they will need.

"They'll be tiny Steven Spielbergs, so to speak," Allen says. "As they

shoot, they'll do some preliminary editing." Jostens will do the rest.

Price to students will be $30 to $40; for an extra fee, each teen can

supply some of his own personal VHS or 8-millimeter film or even

snapshots to make a 90-second personalized lead-in.

A key to Jostens' approach is the streamlining of editing and

production. On one side is the possibility of spending too much time and

money negotiating with the students at each school as to which two

minutes of, say, the eight hours of football coverage should be

included. On the opposite side is the potential for issuing a

mass-produced video that differs only slightly between schools.

Jostens claims that, helped out by state-of-the-art equipment, it

will avoid both traps. "Students will have total editorial control to

decide how much football and where they want it on the tape," Allen

Its competitors aren't so sure.

"If you're doing 300 schools, the economies of scale are fantastic.

But training those students, editing the raw footage and being

responsive to special requests in regard to music, the format of the

video, the overall feel, is virtually impossible," says YearLook's

"At best," he adds, "what you'll have is 15 or 20 minutes of school

footage and the rest will be prepackaged current events, opening and

closing for different sections, special effects that are the same for

every school. They'll look slick, but will they have any authenticity?"

Adds National Video's McCarthy: "Jostens is mainly a marketing

organization. Producing video is mainly a service. You need an awful lot

of understanding about what's going on in the schools."

Schools, in turn, need a lot of understanding of what they're being

offered. Some general advice for the moment when a video producer comes

Determine his experience level. It's easy to talk a good game, but

video yearbooks are not a business an amateur can jump into and produce

a quality product.

In reviewing samples, check out who they were produced by. Some

companies allege that upstarts are trying to get business by passing off

others' work as their own.

View more than one sample. If the same company's efforts feel too

similar, with the same dialogue ("Hooterville had a wonderful year in

1988 ... We all had a simply peachy time," etc.), ask yourself if this

mass-produced approach is acceptable.

Examine the firm's general credibility. If students are doing the

filming, who can they turn to with questions? If the company is doing

it, how much control does the school have over what is shot? More

generally, is the firm going to deliver on its promises?

In its original form, the high-school yearbook was meant for use at

reunions and for perusal on rainy nights of the soul, when you stare at

this strange creature that was yourself 20 years before, wondering what

happened to all your old pals and if your history teacher ever retired

to Flagstaff, Ariz., like he was threatening to do.

A video yearbook doesn't encourage such reflections. If you have

snappy music and snazzy editing, it almost doesn't matter what you show

-- the basketball team winning the state championship, or just doing

National Video's Hendersonville yearbook (only the first half is

finished) has the narrator saying the "football team made the local fans

proud," right before the screen shows two players either fighting or

just horsing around. In either case, is this really the part the fans

were proud of?

Bill Fletcher, a Washington writer and author of Recording Your

Family History: A Guide to Preserving Oral History with Video Tape,

acknowledges these perils, but thinks video yearbooks -- especially when

done by the students -- are still an eminently useful resource.

"We edit the past anyway, with our memories," he says. "Video

increases complexity and makes available feelings you don't ordinarily

have. The richer your mental past and the less you forget, the more

adaptive you are."

Americans, he notes, are swimming in an ocean of video information.

"Most is produced by other people and we are passively observing it. If

a committee of high school kids makes their own video yearbooks, they

become their own producers. They are taking control of technology."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ2FuhXl7j25ma25fmLmiv9Jmpp9laG16tbTEZqSorpmafHODwZyZbGySYrF4rZNma26ZZWKFpH%2BXZmducZRqs3eCmGttamc%3D

BlinkD

CLASS OF '88, THE MOVIE