For four years, I bounced from one tropical location to the next, tanned as a chocolate bar and barely drying up between dives.

Two of those years were spent aboard the Club’s sister sailing ships, Club Med 1 and Club Med 2, largest sailing vessels in the world. Being a dive instructor for Club Med tought me a lot about diving and even more about people. Unfortunately, it also tried to teach me to dance and I lost my inner left meniscus to a French Cancan in rough seas. To this day, I cannot kneel. Some say it’s a lack of modesty, I know it was the stage.

Back then I had grown a bit tired of photography and while my Minolta X-700 traveled with me, its shutter rarely clicked. So one day in St Thomas, I decided to buy a video camera. It was a Sony that recorded 8mm tapes. The quality wasn’t bad for the time, but I soon upgraded to a Hi-8 model with a slightly better image. The problem, however, was that editing hardware was expensive and out of reach. So when I left Club Med my many hours of recording slept in boxes for two decades, gathering dust as video technology evolved rapidly.

My tapes have become obsolete. Their image quality is laughable by today’s standards. But these are memories I cherish and I have always wanted to edit them for the fun of it, since I had already written about them.

I have decided to start producing more footage in the years to come, my gear having reached professional quality levels, and since editing is such an important part of the process, I figured the old Club Med tapes would be great practice. This is first blood. More will follow and the video quality will improve a bit after I switch to the new Hi-8 camera.

They say the key to walking is first taking baby steps. I’m still crawling and scrubbing the floor.

Watch Once Upon a Time, Club Med 1
For those of you reading me via the Feedburner RSS feed, here is a link to the video on Vimeo, as the above won’t work because of my own player’s embed code. Thanks Dru for catching that!