A Filmmaker’s Journey Through Analog Grit and Digital Awakening

My first encounter with Las Vegas in 1994 was nothing like what the glossy travel guides and TV documentaries had promised. Expecting a seamless stretch of neon-lit luxury, I instead found a jarring patchwork of extravagant mega-resorts sitting next to liquor stores, photo labs, wedding chapels, and dusty motels. The glittering new faces of the Strip - Luxor, MGM Grand, Mirage, Treasure Island - stood beside remnants of old Vegas like architectural fossils that refused to vanish. It was a strange, surreal contrast for a first-time visitor. Only later did I understand that this was a city in transition, and I had walked into it at a historical turning point.

Back then, I was still a beginner filmmaker - wide-eyed, ambitious, and burdened with gear that was barely up to the task. My camcorder battery life was abysmal, which made me carry multiple backups and even resort to a slow, almost useless car battery charger. On that same trip, I remember buying a replacement battery from a small Korean-run shop near the MGM Grand. It turned out to be defective, and the shop owner flatly refused to take it back. That was frustrating, but it was also typical for the tourist zones of Vegas in that era - places where customer service took a back seat to profit, and everything came with a "no returns" sign either visible or implied.

Still, the passion for filming outweighed the setbacks. I was in the phase where I wanted to capture everything. My takes were long, sprawling, often unfocused, but sincere. I was documenting, not directing. But just a year later, after gaining some hard-earned experience, I noticed a transformation. My filming style matured. The shots became deliberate, shorter, more composed. A single battery would last me days, not because the tech had improved, but because I had. That year, I embarked on a cross-country flying trip - from Fairfield, Iowa to California, across Colorado and the Southwest, and back. It became a defining chapter in my creative evolution.

It was during this period that I made the jump from analog to digital editing. I had been using two VCRs - a Nordmende and an old ITT machine my father had bought in 1985. Without timecode, my hit rate was about ±1 second. By today's standards, that level of inaccuracy is laughable, but back then, we lived with it. Every cut was an act of courage and compromise. Yet, even within those crude limits, I learned timing, patience, and the discipline to visualize my edit before committing to tape.

The leap to non-linear editing was both a liberation and a nightmare. I bought my first NLE system - a light version of Adobe Premiere - and ran it on a Pentium machine with 16 MB of RAM and three 1GB hard drives. Rendering was glacial, and the system often froze or crashed under the weight of its own ambition. Still, for the first time, I had frame-accurate control. I could move scenes around, trim clips, add music and titles, experiment, undo, and explore. It was painstaking, but it was mine. I edited my first hour-long documentary using that setup, based on the footage from the flying trip. I sent VHS copies to my co-travelers, and to this day, some of them still remember it with joy and gratitude. That film became more than just a personal milestone - it was a shared memory, crafted and preserved.

The creative control I found through digital editing, despite all its early horrors, opened up a new world. I began thinking not just as someone who filmed things, but as someone who constructed narratives. It wasn't about recording anymore - it was about shaping meaning. That first documentary, rough as it was, looked and felt like a real film. It carried intention, rhythm, and structure. It was the moment I stopped thinking of myself as a hobbyist and began seeing myself as a filmmaker.

I haven’t watched those old tapes in quite some time, but I think I should. They are more than just footage - they are a record of growth, a reflection of who I was and who I was becoming. Revisiting them now would not only bring back memories of the 90s - the clunky chargers, the broken batteries, the hard-won edits - it would remind me of how far I’ve come, and how much passion carried me through. In the end, it wasn’t the gear that defined those early works, but the vision and the will to tell a story with whatever tools I had. And that’s something no upgrade can replace.