This morning, apropos nothing, I remembered one of my early attempts at the simple act of taking a screenshot of a frame you like in a movie or a TV show.
The movie in question was Land Before Time, and I was fascinated with the different faces Littlefoot makes as he says "The Great Valley" at the end, you know the scene, and I wanted a picture of one of those faces. But how to go about that in the early 90's?
Well, I did have the movie on VHS, so I could have multiple tries, but when I paused the VHS it would have all kinds of messy static on the image, and maybe even a big "paused" symbol in the middle, so I did have to take the screenshot while the movie was running and hope I caught the frame I wanted. The only screen I had was the TV screen, and that or the VHS player didn't have a system in place to capture an image of the thing you were watching, so I had to take a photo of the screen with a camera. The TV was one of those big boxy ones with a glass screen, so I had to turn off all lights in the room for that or they would reflect on the screen. Because the TV was in the living room, I had to do this when turning the lights off for a while wouldn't inconvenience the rest of the family.
After I'd taken the couple of photos I was allowed to use up film for with my mom's camera, I couldn't check right away that I'd gotten photos that looked any good, because the film had to be developed first. And first I had to wait for mom to finish the film roll by finding enough photographable things. Then we took the film to be developed, paid for that, and eventually got our photos from the shop (
the photoshop!), and I wondered if the person developing our photos had found it weird that there were several shots of a TV screen showing a cartoon dinosaur making faces in there (they probably hadn't, they had kids too, but yeah somebody had to see each of your photos in order for them to get developed).
And then I finally got my screenshot to hold in my hands and maybe put on the wall of my room if I wanted! But alas, none of them were the animation frame I had wanted. I didn't get to try again, because it cost to get each photo developed, and there are more fleeting moments to capture on limited film than frames in a movie that's still going to exist and look the same decades later.
But anyway, here you go, tiny me:
You won't get to see it for a couple of those decades, of course, but hey that's almost as long as it felt like it took to get your photos developed anyway, and I guess better late than never. And surprise surprise, when you're a big and old adult with Responsibilities, you're going to be no less fascinated with cartoon art and dinosaurs or even combinations thereof.
