“You must’ve been such a happy family. All your movies prove it.”

That often came from people who sat through our home movies that showed us opening Christmas gifts sometime back in the ‘40s. Movies don’t lie, but they do exaggerate and can be manipulated.

Need proof? Well, all of the movies of us Trujillos show us much mirthier, earthier and girthier than we really were. Back then. But now, if we take the time to view those pre-historic flicks, we appear quite slim. See? The exaggeration works both ways.

The “Leave-It-To-Beaver” image of us was partly an illusion. Of course, love and warmth abounded, but when you have just minutes to make a good impression, things change.

We were among the first on our block to own an 8mm movie camera. It was a noisy, single-lens wind-up gadget that lacked today’s features like batteries, auto focus, zoom and pause. And the thing needed to be fed, a tricky process whose complexity rivaled the lunar landing or an Immaculate Conception School Christmas pageant.

In those days, home movie cameras took a roll of 16mm film. When we got to the end of the roll, in about two minutes, it was time to retire to a darkroom — or at least to a dark room. Dad would flip the roll, the way one would turn over a phonograph record, to expose the other side. Then, at the lab, the film would be sliced down the middle, and then spliced, to make a 50-foot roll of 8mm film.

By the time the finished product arrived from the lab, some of us children were no longer prepubescent. Because the four minutes of our lives the camera captured were so brief, all of us Trujillos needed to prep for the shooting. We’d don whatever presentable clothes we had, comb our hair, smile and put aside our differences.

We rehearsed our coming moments of infamy, each of us doing the proper petting of the dog or throwing of a ball or simply looking radiant.

Unlike technology today that allows one to shoot from a corner unobtrusively and capture all the action, movie cameras of old were much more cumbersome. In dark areas, we needed heavy, hot flood lamps, which had to be plugged in. And where does one access a plug when the only outlet in the I.C. Auditorium was 80 feet away?

What’s the situation today? Well, with no trouble, people can operate their video cams for hours. Earlier this month, I watched several hours of a (live) invitational basketball tournament in Springer. Across the way, on the very top rows, were a battery of video cameras, all mounted on tripods, operated by doting parents, catching every minute of action on the court as four Des Moines Demons teams took on the Red Devils.

Even videotape is becoming obsolete, so running out of film or tape is a misnomer. But is the extended length an advantage? If someone shoots the entire game in which his ‘Jito scored a basket, do we invitees need to watch all of it — in real time — as if we were there in the stands? And likely, we were in the stands when the epic was being caught on video cam . . . and we get to watch it again.

I’m a hobbyist and take photos when I can. I bought a tape-operated video cam several years ago. Why? I guess because everyone else had one. Most such cameras have a built-in viewer that allows the photographer to watch the video on a tiny screen and catch the audio as well.

But does that convenient feature negate some of the joy of taking videos? Does anyone actually hook up the wires to the flat-screen TV to watch the 67 hours of basketball video taken last week? At times it’s easier and faster merely to invite those interested to watch the tiny screen on the camera.

Strange, but many who take the time to watch all the action do so within minutes after the game-ending buzzer. It’s as if we expect the action to change in that short time, or else we simply want to make sure we actually remembered to remove the lens cap.

That happened once when my Dad shot four minutes of home movies. A month later, we received a completely blank processed film with a reminder that it works better with the lens cap removed.

Dad was not amused.