I always loved tinkering with video and waaaay back in 2000 or so is when I started toying with AMVs. My peak was doing trailers with the best ones in 2004-2006 and things kinda faded out quickly since then. I'm older but in college now, doing a film and television production program here in Canada and everything I learned doing AMVs has given me a huge leg up in the editing department. I started on Premiere 6.5 in 2001 or 2002, I started toying with After Effects in 2004. The rest of my classmates havn't seen anything from Adobe before this past September, except for using Photoshop to caption photos of cats. I don't need to study my text books to memorize 'NTSC', 'PAL', '29.97', '16:9', '4:2:0', '3:2 Pulldown', 'Interlacing' or any of that technical stuff. Why? Because AMVs engrained that into me for years. Classmates thing I'm some kind of god at After Effects, but I just look and say 'No, I just have experience with it. Believe me, in 2004 I was looking at AE and crying 'WHAT IS THIS DEMON SPAWN OF PREMIERE, PHOTOSHOP AND SATAN, AND WHY DOES IT MOCK ME SO!? ;_;'
So I can edit and do motion graphics beyond that of anyone else in my class and this is all thanks to AMVs. Sadly this does not make me a god at film and television production. As an AMV editor I was spoiled, all I had to do was EDIT; All the footage was pre-created my experts in the animation and television fields.
Lighting, camera operation, sound, framing, acting, getting filming locations, story boards, scripts, dept of field. In AMV's you don't have to watch the sound levels on your DSLR camera that you bootstrapped a shotgun mic onto so you can shoot first person material in 1080p, you just drag and drop that song onto the timeline and bam. I have a tonne to learn in field of film and television, but thanks to AMVs, editing and the technical side of video isn't one of them.
But on the other hand, school is pretty awesome. Why? Not only do we have a tonne of gear, a live production studio with a giant green screen and other goodies... But because the school has so many other programs that I get to leech off of. Like the paramedic program, it's gear and it's three ambulances. Or the nursing program and it's functional emergency room simulation center with 20 beds. There's a fire fighter program, I havn't leeched that fire truck off them but good god I will one of these days.
So with that, I'd like to share my first attempt, mostly a proof of concept, at doing a Canadian paramedic drama. It's rough but there will be more as we gain experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB98_fIB ... AoDc--TlWi