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              <text>My first "activist video" was inspired by my horror at the ambitiously amoral Ontario Premier Mike Harris, who to this day I would very much like to see boiled alive in tar. &#13;
&#13;
During the Metro Days of Action - October 25 &amp; 26, 1996, culminating in the largest protest march ever in Toronto - I was struck at the sheer volume of camcorders, which had only recently become a hot consumer item. What could be done, I thought, if these amateur videographers pooled their resources? &#13;
&#13;
So, after the fact, I managed to get a notice published in NOW Magazine asking for raw footage, and about ten people got back to me with their varied documents of the protest. I then set about figuring how to give all this random shaky stuff some kind of form.&#13;
&#13;
Still developing my chops as an editor, I decided to structure the video around a single speech, a particularly compelling piece of oratory by Joan Grant-Cummings, then president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. I used her words as a frame off of which I hung images that both reflected on her words and encapsulated the broad variety of creative actions that were undertaken that weekend. &#13;
&#13;
Simple though it may have been in concept, the technical process was unique to its time. One of the videographers I got in touch with, Vic Garbutt, was the coordinator of the Bain Co-op closed circuit TV station, and he offered his non-frame-accurate VHS editing facilities to complete the video. To save studio time, I actually edited the audio *first*, running sound from my living room VCR to my Yamaha cassette 4-track recorder. I then edited the picture to the sound, again without precise frame control, so that I had to avoid images with sync audio wherever possible. This maddening process involved a great deal of logging and timing and fussing ahead of the fact, using techniques I had learned while working in post-production at Vision TV. &#13;
&#13;
The video debuted at Symptom Hall on the one year anniversary of the protest. Shortly thereafter I brought the tape to an open screening at U of T, and that night I met what would become the nucleus of the Toronto Video Activist Collective.</text>
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              <text>7:43</text>
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              <text>Jonathan Culp</text>
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              <text>&lt;br /&gt;&lt;iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iM8AbXu5fXc" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</text>
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                <text>Action!</text>
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                <text>An activist video about the Metro Days of Action, which uses camcorder footage contributed by ten different participants.</text>
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                <text>Jonathan Culp</text>
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                <text>Jonathan Culp</text>
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                <text>1997</text>
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                <text>Jonathan Culp</text>
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                <text>Jonathan Culp&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt;</text>
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