The Video Clips

The company's video page ran on Windows Media and hope. The clips it offered were short tasters of the productions, one per title, plus one unusual file that showed a prop being made. In the record they sit as .wmv files with initials for names, each preceded by a tiny icon that marked video territory on a page built in 2007.

What the sheet keeps

Four video files carry the record: the dragon dragging across a stage, the red button's number, the wooden heart's toy trio, and the prop-creation clip from the monster's production. A loose .mp4 and the Flash curtain that once opened the whole site belong to the same shelf, the moving pictures the company thought worth the bandwidth.

The clips were sized for a school's connection and a school secretary's patience. Nothing in the record suggests long-form video; the company's own framing called them clips, tastes, the length of a principal's coffee break.

What the clips were for

The video page existed to answer the question a CD could not: what does it look like when the lights go down in a gymnasium and two hundred children go quiet? A still photograph can lie about a play; thirty seconds of video is harder to fake. The clips were the booking department's best evidence.

The prop-building clip deserves its own line. Most theatres hide their making; this one published it. For a non-profit asking schools to trust it with their assemblies, showing the glue gun was its own credential, proof that the monster was built by hand in a workshop, not shipped from a catalogue.

What a clip had to prove

A video clip on this site was not a trailer in the cinema sense. It was a thirty-second affidavit, sworn to a principal who had never seen the company work, attesting that real actors in real costumes would show up and hold a gymnasium. The clips' small size and plain names are evidence of their job, not their ambition.

The record kept four of them plus the curtain that opened the site itself. Between the curtain and the clips, the archive preserved the company's whole moving-picture vocabulary: the flourish that greeted the visitor and the proof that waited behind it.

The clips also record a forgotten piece of stagecraft: the flash curtain that once opened the site is itself a tiny performance, a theatre's lobby rendered in a plugin. The company wanted visitors to feel a curtain rise before a single page loaded, which is a charming ambition for a dial-up era website and a fitting overture for a troupe whose whole work was making gymnasiums feel like theatres.

The moving-picture shelf closes with a caveat the record itself supplies: none of the files plays in a modern browser. The clips survive as names, sizes and dates, playable only in imagination, which is perhaps the right fate for a company that asked children to do the rendering anyway.

The sheet therefore holds both the clips' promise and their obsolescence: evidence that the company made its case in moving pictures, and evidence that the case now requires an old operating system to replay. The volume keeps the files' memory rather than their playback, which is the honest state of the record.

How the volume files it

Bound last in Cahier II, after the shelf and the song clips, because the videos are the record's youngest media. The record kept four clips and the curtain; it did not keep view counts, and the Flash file no longer plays anywhere.

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