I assume they were “audio/visual” clubs, so you’re working with cameras and recorders and stuff.
I can see that being kind of nerdy, but I’m surprised that was the nerdy thing in high school in the way being in a computer club or an anime club in the ’90s and ’00s was. I mean, movies and TV were popular and full of attractive people, so I’d have thought being into that sort of thing would have at least made you on par with the theatre kids.
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Essentially, we’d take care of projectors and TV/VHS/Audio stuff. We’d wheel stuff into classrooms or auditoriums, and set it up whenever the teachers needed them. Some minor maintenance on the projectors, if I’m remembering correctly.
In my experience (UK, went to high school in the 90/00’s) — any club that wasn’t sports was nerdy. Athletes were worshipped, and usually at the top of social hierarchy. If you went to any other club, it was likely because you had nowhere else to go, ie no friends to hang out with (or they were all into sports)
I was the “AV club” for my middle school. The school let me set up the computer lab when they got a bunch of Macintosh POS models dumped on the district. I set up the network (such as it was back then) and did a good enough job that they put me in charge of all things cabled. It was fun. I was responsible for maintaining equipment, teaching students how to operate cameras and such (it wasn’t very extensive) and do light video editing for their projects. I was able to replace PE with my work, everyone made out on the deal. Yes it was incredibly nerdy, I was that kid.
Audio Visual. Really?
It very much used to be the computer club in the time before computers in the school.
Really though, it was more like a student based IT department that would manage the schools audio video equipment, and also the students could get hands on equipment that would be way out of their abilities to buy.
As a former 1980’s president of my high school’s drama club, I can tell you, unabashedly, that we were on NO ONE’s desired list of people to be on par with. We were probably the most bullied and mocked people in the whole school. As proud as I was to be president of the club, I most certainly did not go around the rest of the school letting anyone know about it.
At one point, the school decided to do a presentation of our full-length play for the entire student body, during school hours. I was mortified that not only was everyone now going to know I was in Drama, but that I was one of the lead actors in the play.
But yes, I have always found it funny that the “performer” kids who get picked on the most in high school are the ones who end up being idolized by huge numbers of people later on in life. Jeanette McCurdy, Eminem, and Dolly Parton are three examples who had horrible childhoods. In summary… kids are cruel to anyone who doesn’t follow the flock, but maybe that’s part of the experience of not following the flock.
Oh… I quit acting in college. I design home theater consumer electronics now. So maybe I ended up in the AV Club after all.
For me, I liked video editing. At the time joining AV club was the only way I could get access to the hardware that could convert camcorder footage into a computer file that I could edit.
This may come as a shock, but the school would have one TV with one VCR on a cart. If the TV got reeled into a class I happened to be in, I was usually the one who did the incredibly difficult job of running the remote. Or we got a wireless language lab my senior year, the technology overwhelmed the Spanish teacher. And since I showed great prowess in using a remote, I had to operate that too.
There wasn’t an official club, but it’s just because there were a few of us slightly ahead of the curve on technology usage.
Pre-VCRs, you needed to be able to set up a film projector, and the AV clubs were for kids who were interested in film as well as the equipment. Until very, very recently, nerd culture really was put down a lot, I even got teased in the 90s, because my mom ran the computer lab and I hung out there after school.
My school’s hierarchy went: jocks, funny kids, theater kids, honor roll kids, nerds and geeks. I loved hanging out in the computer lab and all of that AV club type of thing (we didn’t have an official one), but I was in the minority.
True story, I once told a coworker shortly after moving to Japan that I had been a member of the AV club in elementary school. That shocked him to his core. Then, I learned that the acronym means something different here. lol
Regarding the popularity of movies: Movies and TV were popular and full of attractive people, yes. But those popular attractive people are actors. No one really cares about the behind the scenes people unless they have a legitimate appreciation for film as an art form.
A 16 year old boy with a casual interest in media who wants to emulate an actor who plays guitar and gets all of the girls on TV doesn’t translate to wanting to be a production assistant on a film, it translates to wanting to
learn guitar he can impress girls.
It was like half way between the “shortwave radio club” and the “solder your own computer together club”, except since it involved video production you had a smattering of attractive wannabe future models/actors/journalists/meteorologists frequently mixed in.. all trying to make (probably) a low budget horror movie, low budget regional humor sketch show, school news program, etc. That made it the cool version of afterschool nerd room.
It was nerdy, at least in my day, in that it was helpful to know how to make your own cables and solder together parts you got from radio shack. Also can be a cool optics angle if you’re into lenses. The one I was part of was actually a surprising number of people, so there were multiple intermeshed social groups each focusing on their preferred aspect of it (like we even had a kid who’s whole thing was doing wild special effects makeup experiments and didn’t know anything about the electronics side.)
Edit: I only got roped into the free labor stuff once where I had to run sound with two others for a couple musical performances. I guess knowing how to thread a film reel came in handy more than once too.
Boring, technical stuff for people not beautiful enough to be in front of the camera.
Free IT labor mostly.
The AV club was where the tech nerds hung out before the computer club was a thing.
We treated the theater kids like shit, too. So Cal 1979-1982.
Multimedia Club is the modern equivalent -ish. My uncle was in AV club in the 70s and he became a TV repairman. Basically they set up and ran and tore down and maintained the school’s audio/visual equipment: sound systems/lighting for productions/events (theater, graduation), projectors, even darkroom/photography for yearbook. He had a darkroom setup at home, wired the TV antenna, and set up a speaker system at home. Nerdy because that was some pretty esoteric knowledge at the time – things were not so plug-and-play back then – so basically to be proficient in those things as a kid you would have to spend a lot of time tinkering with that stuff alone instead of hanging out with friends or playing sports.
I always thought that was the coolest part about him, though.
Haha, I was in the AV Club. Last minute too, computers were already starting to take over by the time I left. No surprise to me that our lasting legacy is one of possibly undeserved shame. It was the culture. Anyone who knows how to do stuff is a nerd. If you’re cool you hire nerds, you don’t aspire to be one. The 80s were very pro-wealth and anti-talent. Now all of those jocks have grown up and become the voting majority. Good luck, eh?
My school district let us volunteer in high school, to run the district’s cable TV channel. We got to play with switchers and giant cameras.
Amazes me that now, most of the functionality of that switcher, is in software on this computer now.
Audio video. I was in one until 2009ish. It’s film kids and also most of them are tech or videography oriented. Actors acted in theater. They are as nerdy as the techies in theater.
Keep in mind being a techie before social media was considered very nerdy. Now that tech is mainstream and important to everyone it’s not weird, but there was very much a shift.
Come on. TV and movies are broadly popular. Technical skills and know-how, taking the time to learn something you don’t have to learn? Those have never been popular.
You would get a solid response to this in the commercialAV subreddit. Glory days gone by of audio recording, 16mm projectors, film strips with sync’ed cassette audio. People will wax poetic about how the top loading VHS deck was a better design than the front loading one that became more popular.
> I’m surprised that was the nerdy thing
Here’s a schematic for how to thread a projector. Here’s another. And these were a relatively simple ones.
And that’s just a projector. You’ve got amplifiers, receivers, all kinds of audio/video hardware.
These were NOT user-friendly, and they were NOT something people had in their homes.
Trust us, it was the nerdy thing in those days. Just like nerds who use Linux today, or the ones who bought early computers like Commodore 64s.
We used to run the technology in our auditorium, including projectors, lights, and sound. Really cool experience and we were all nerds. I graduated in 2021
Anyone not on sports team or cheerleading was a nerd. It was not cool to like tech of any type.
And theater club is for geeks, but theyll be the ones in movies eventually.