The Camcorder Emoji 📹

Like so many teens before us, my childhood friend Chris and I were absolute idiots. We considered it suitable to document our idiocy using a camcorder that Chris had gotten for his birthday. The video resolution was as low as 320 × 240 and the sound quality was horrendous. In the beginning of the millennium, with this novel way to visually record our shenanigans, we kept a finger on the pulse of the time.

In the earliest of these videos, I jumped off from the staircase in front of the house and landed on my knees, on the concrete floor. Today, it amazes me, that I did one of my most extreme stunts right at the beginning of my promising career as a stuntman. Other "stunts" we usually did could be placed into one of the following categories: jumping into bushes, rolling off hills, falling off skateboards and a lot of sliding—sliding on wet lawns after it had rained in the summer months or sliding down the hill in winters that brought plenty of snow.

What we produced over the course of the next five years was the epitome of the video clip: 5 to 20 second long videos of us being idiots. We later extended the cast of our videos to include our other friends Mario and Max.

Our role models were the worst role models one could think of: Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera and Steve-O, all part of the then popular TV series "Jackass". In honour of their work, we called ourselves "Jackass Kids", abbreviated as "JAK". Later, when we realised that this name wasn't very original, we sticked to calling our group "JAK", but let go of the association to Jackass.

My plans of becoming a stuntman weren't all that serious. I never severely injured myself and I never did anything utterly stupid (at least in the mind of a teenage boy).

One of the most groundbreaking moments in our years as amateur film makers slash stuntmen, was on a sunny day, in what must have been 2004, when Chris suddenly realised that he could actually turn off the camera. Looking at the camera‘s design, this wasn't completely obvious and when we realised the hidden feature in this heureka moment, we couldn't believe it. Battery life was a real issue and before this epiphany, we relied on the camcorder's ability to turn itself off automatically after a minute or so.

We never really knew what to with all of our material of stupids stunts, inside jokes and senseless conversations other than spending hours on end in Chris‘s room, coming up with file names for the videos so that we would recognise them later. Today, I‘m really happy that back then, YouTube didn't exist yet, otherwise I'd feel really embarrassed to find these embarrassing videos of me on the internet—although Chris once did upload some of them to a Geocities page.