What Is A Reenactor?

A Video With Purpose

My friend Matt over at The Agincourt Solider has been working to develop one of his newest of many projects, History Live! North East; “a 501c3 Non-Profit organization that provides high-fidelity, accurate, informative, interactive, and engaging Living History presentations and demonstrations to primary and secondary schools, free of charge.” During the school shutdown he has been working diligently to develop the site into a distance learning tool. As a fan of collaboration (Matt and I are working together on the Pilgrim Progress Challenge) I was eager to assist. However, my articles and videos to date are not aimed at the elementary school audience, and they are more meant to be resources for the reenactment and living history community than instructional on history itself. Still, I wanted to contribute something to help and Matt suggested I work on a video about what reenactors are.

Though I have been playing around with video, they have been supplementary to my mission here. Which means I have not been putting the type of editing and composition into them one would expect from a producer of content intended to be primarily visual in nature. Working on a video which was meant to be self-contained, educational, and resourceful independent of the website or my other resources was a new skill which I cannot say I was eager to explore, but one I was willing to. This is the result, a video intended to give someone an idea of what a reenactor is who has never interacted with Living History or Reenactment before, or has a superficial understanding.

From a technical standpoint it has much to be desired. Video editing is a time consuming process. Between recording, processing video, editing, rendering, uploading, etc. I spent in excess of twelve hours to make thirteen minutes of video. Some of this was time spent studying tutorials or making horrendous, restart-from-scratch mistakes. Among the half a dozen new things I tried in this video were moving picture-in-picture effects, text on screen, credits, and actually having ‘cuts’ instead of just blathering on in one take (the latter of which makes editing much easier.) While I did lots of cuts, I’m certain there’s an elegance to the cuts I can improve on. There are some audio issues I cannot figure out how to fix, even with googling, and I think some of it may be recording errors. Doing a more complex video taught me more than I expected, and gave me a hefty dose of respect for those who produce videos more than once a month.