Lights! Camera! Graduation!

By Richard Zoglin

At 31, Sue Wilson would seem past the age for such high school rituals as pep rallies, homecoming dances and senior proms. But she spent a good deal of this past school year reliving rites like these at Parkway West High in suburban St. Louis. She attended the senior picnic, the homecoming parade and the annual King of Hearts dance, a Sadie Hawkins-style bash where the girls ask out the boys. And when 550 seniors got their diplomas at graduation ceremonies last weekend, Wilson was there for all the speeches, hugs, cheers and tears.

Wilson's year at Parkway West was not just a Back to the Future nostalgia trip. Her constant companion was a video camera, and she is now assembling her footage into a 30- to 45-minute videotape for the class of '87. Parkway West is just one of a growing number of schools that have discovered a new twist on a venerable senior-year tradition: the video yearbook.

For members of the VCR generation, these video chronicles make an alluring supplement to the traditional hardbound yearbook. Some schools take a do-it- yourself approach; all that is needed is some video equipment and a few students willing to put in the time and effort. Others opt for outside video firms like Copy Cat Video, a St. Louis-based company that Wilson runs with her partner Claudia Walters. Typically, such video entrepreneurs contract with students at the school to tape certain big events during the year, as well as scenes of everyday school life and, in some cases, individual student interviews. The footage is then edited down, usually to between 30 and 60 minutes, and offered for sale for about $30 or $40.

The quality of the video memoirs varies. Some have a home-movie amateurishness, with ill-lit camerawork, tinny musical interludes from the school band and interminable shots of students horsing around for the camera. Others strive for more professionalism, with rock songs on the sound track and TV news-style interviews. This year's video for Eastwood High School in Pemberville, Ohio, opens with an old woman rummaging through a trunk in her dusty attic. Inside she finds a forgotten videocassette, which she pops into a VCR. The tape, of course, turns out to be Eastwood High's 1986-87 video.

Perhaps the slickest of the new video yearbooks is produced by Year Look Enterprises of Durham, N.C. The company is the brainchild of Bob Levitan, 26, who made a video chronicle of the 1981-82 school year at Duke University while a student there. Though the tape was just a student project, dozens of people later asked if they could buy copies. Seeing a potential market, Levitan produced a 40-minute video yearbook the following year and sold 100 copies at $45 each. His company now has a roster of 20 clients, including such universities as Princeton, Brown and Michigan. The tapes are fast-paced, smoothly edited overviews of the school year, with scenes of everything from basketball games to campus demonstrations.

Despite their growing popularity, video yearbooks are unlikely to replace the old-fashioned hardbound volume. For one thing, there is no place for classmates to sign their names and scrawl wisecracking farewells. For another, says Alan Heath, director of marketing for Taylor Publishing, a leading yearbook publisher, "you can't freeze the same amount of time on a one-hour video as you can in a 250-page yearbook." Even the most successful video yearbooks are rarely bought by more than a quarter of the graduating students, compared with two-thirds or so who usually pick up the book version. Still, the converts in academia are enthusiastic. Frank Wiener, 66, who directs the TV program at Staples High School in Westport, Conn., pays video yearbooks the ultimate tribute: "I wish I had one from my high school."

With reporting by Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis and William Tynan/New York