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In Europe until the 5th of September, but I am still getting contacts from home.
Particularly nice are emails from old friends I have not seen in a long time.
It’s funny how just a few lines can bring back a whole world of memories.
Yesterday, I got an email from Marcel Theroux. Â He was one of the original VJs on the Channel 1 project in London, which I did in 1994!
Marcel was then a young journalist, just getting started. Â He wrote to send me a link to a video project he just completed with The Guardian, (the UK newspaper).
Marcel took an old Russian steam train from Moscow to the White Sea in the Arctic, and not only wrote about it for The Guardian, but also took along his video camera and documented it for them as well.
Travel by train may come naturally to Marcel, as might travel journalism. His father is Paul Theroux, who wrote, among other things, The Great Railway Bazaar, about taking the trans-Siberia Railway from Moscow to the Pacific. It’s one of the great travel reads of all time. In this case, as you can see, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And unlike the father, Marcel has the added power of video.
When Marcel took the course, we were still using Hi-8 cameras. The idea of video online was unthinkable. Even laptop editing software was in the future. At Channel 1 we cut on the very first Avids, very very radical at the time, courtesy of Julian Aston.
It is hard to believe that it was 15 years ago that we did the bootcamp for Channel 1 that Marcel participated in. Â It is even harder to believe that his experience then still sticks with him now to this day.
Some things last a lifetime.
And sometimes it only takes an email to remind you of that.
