On December 16th, 2011, at nine in the morning, I walked across the stage at Texas A&M with a GoPro HD strapped to the top of my graduation cap.
MS in Marketing. And a camera on my head, because of course there was.
A Mortarboard Is A Terrible Camera Mount
Let me get the practical part out of the way, since this is the bit somebody is going to want to copy.
A graduation cap is genuinely one of the worst mounting surfaces you will ever be handed. It is flat, which sounds good until you remember that a mortarboard does not sit flat on your head, it sits at an angle, so your camera is permanently aimed about fifteen degrees above where you are looking. It is also stiff card, so it flexes, and the whole assembly wobbles every time you move your head.
And there is no screen. There is never a screen with these. You are wearing a camera you cannot see the output of, at a ceremony you cannot repeat, wearing something you cannot adjust once you are seated and boxed into a row. You get one shot at aiming it, in a bathroom mirror, an hour beforehand.
It worked out. It very easily might not have.
What The Camera Actually Got
Here is the thing that surprised me, and the reason this video is worth two minutes of anybody’s time.
I expected the good part to be the walk across the stage. It is not. The good part is that people notice the camera and react to it, and those reactions are the whole film. Faculty in full regalia catching sight of it and grinning. Somebody congratulating the hat rather than me. A photographer clocking it for the second time. One person just says very clever as I go past.
None of that exists if you put a tripod at the back of the hall with a long lens on it. A camera at a distance records an event. A camera on your head is a participant in it, and everybody it passes responds to it, and that response is a thing you cannot get any other way.
That is worth remembering well beyond graduations. Whenever you are trying to make something feel like it is happening to the viewer rather than in front of them, the answer is usually not a better lens. It is a camera in the middle of the thing, accepting that it will be shakier and softer and worse in every measurable way, because measurable is not what you are optimising for.
The Cap Toss
The ending writes itself, and I mean that literally, because there is exactly one way a graduation film can end.
The mortarboard goes up. The camera goes with it. You get about a second and a half of the entire auditorium spinning past, which is unusable by any normal standard and is obviously the best shot in the video.
Filmed in College Station, on my own head.