Shooting video -- with bullets

A Juxtapoz article from last March featured the firearm-flavored contemporary illustrative photoshoppery of Adam Wheatley. I'm especially fond of this visual commentary on shooting video.

Juxtapoz Magazine - The Illustrations of Adam Wheatley (via Kadrey)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: guns • happy mutants • illustration • shoop

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neurolux

When you film a cop, that’s what he sees.
inkfumes

The truth hurts.
chellberty

Violent porn.
Andre Vandal

Original of the Super 8mm Cameras is here:
http://www.filmbuffonline.com/FBOLNewsreel/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Super8Camera.jpg
Paul Renault

You’ll end up with a black eye, if you hold it up to your face and pull the trigger.
Keith Tyler

Didn’t Jack Ruby have one of these?
Brainspore

I’m especially fond of this visual commentary on shooting video.

Technically a Super 8 camera doesn’t shoot “video.”
- David Carroll
  
  “Oxford Dictionary: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/video
  
  1) The recording, reproducing, or broadcasting of moving visual images:”
  No mention of any device or media used to do this. I would quote other sources but a lot of then don’t support my point! ;)
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    NOOOOOOO!!!! Audio only refers to cassettes! Or maybe 8-tracks.
    
    I don’t get why people keep making this silly quibble when video simply refers to a visual recording.
    - http://www.kmoser.com kmoser
      
      Huh? “Video” is short for “videotape” which implies a magnetic medium that generally contains tracks for audio (sound) and video (visual) data.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Video precedes videotape. The visual portion of television was called video while it was still broadcasting film. The idea that video is an abbreviation for videotape is incorrect.
      - nixiebunny
        
        Video refers to the electrical signal that represents a picture, as from a video camera. But it can also mean something by Huey Lewis and the News.
    - Tim Drage
      
      It’s not a silly quibble this way around. Referring to shooting something on video as “filming” is common enough that it can seem a bit pedantic to argue against it but nobody commonly calls use of a cine film camera ‘videoing’
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        You’re not being pedantic; you’re just simply incorrect.
    - Tim Drage
      
      In Soviet Boingboing, moderator trolls you!
    - Brainspore
      
      You call it whatever you want, but my family actually had one of those Super 8 cameras and nobody we knew referred to our home movies as “videos.”
- Jellodyne
  
  Technically, the camera pictured doesn’t appear to shoot video or film, it appears to shoot 5.56 mm belted bullets.
K-9

Video? Video??? Boing Boing, I am disappoint.
Russell Letson

Antinous, I’m going to risk this with only a quick rummage through my American Heritage Dictionary to back me up, but while “video” does originate in the television field (in mid-1930s), I have never seen it applied to film images. I started using 8mm film cameras around 1965, and we never used “video” in relation to what we were doing. When consumer-level videotape cameras and decks became available, we called them “video cameras” “video recorders” and understood them to be distinct from film. I would say that “video” refers to electronically captured and recorded visual data, and while some future form of English might conflate the two technologies, history nerds will understand the difference and distinguish between them, just as competent military historians distinguish between the musket and the rifle.

BTW, I spotted the camera in the image as a Super-8 camera immediately.
- NateXT
  
  Would you have preferred Cory to have written “…shooting film” ?
  - Tim Drage
    
    ….. yes?
    - Brainspore
      
      “Shooting footage” works too.
Tim Drage

Can never figure out if Cory is trolling or not. Calling an 8mm camera ‘video’ is for people on ebay clearing out a deceased relative’s loft, not for media-savvy retro-loving hipsters also old enough to remember super-8 home movies as a living media.
http://twitter.com/Listener43 Listener43

I have an 8mm video camera, as well as an 8mm movie camera (not that Super version, the real thing, made from 16mm film sliced lengthwise).
I don’t think I’ve really added anything to the discussion.
You’re welcome.
Russell Letson

NateXT: No, since almost nobody* shoots film any more–I’m only interested in the notion that one would call doing so “shooting video” with equipment that uses film, especially given the probability that a person doing the shooting would be quite aware of the distinction. Youngsters, of course, often apply current language to technologies and devices that passed out of use before they were born, which gives the geezer generation something to smile about as they explain reel-to-reel tape recorders or buggy whips or road maps.

*Outside of pro or deliberately retro hobbyist/hipster-artist circles–in fact, I don’t even know where I’d find stock for my Super 8 cameras, let alone my old Bolex H8. Or a lab to process it. Or a replacement lamp for my projector. (I went to video around 1989.)
eldueno

How to encourage the subject of of the video to look puzzled.
timquinn

Apparently the newbs around here don’t know that when you stick bullets in your film camera it’s called “shootin’ video.”

Catch up already!
Photomonkey

It was my understanding that the analogy of cameras as guns and subsequent phrasing of “shooting film” (or shooting video, shooting plates, shootings stills, etc) originates from the late 19th century and the work of frenchman Etienne-Jules Marey. He used cameras to study locomotion, helping to pioneer motion pictures and inspire the Futurism aesthetic, but along the way he also designed a camera that was shaped like a rifle. This rifle-shaped camera recorded several frames of a moving subject on to a rotating photo-sensitive disc. I completely forget why it was shaped like a gun but I can look it up after I take a nap.

But does anyone else know of an earlier precedent for the camera as gun analogy? I believe this was in the 1880′s-90′s? Perhaps Matthew Brady and the American Civil War?

Perhaps this more questions than answers … to a question no one asked.