In 1982 Robert and Marjory Potts began Vineyard Video Productions, a company that creates documentary and educational films. Their first film was called Making Music: The Emerson String Quartet. The short film (30 minutes) was shot over one week in July 1982 when the quartet played on the Vineyard. At the time the Emerson was only six years old. It was formed in 1976 and is still going strong today.

Island guy Elliott Vecchia’s new movie Natural Selection is a skateboarding film shot around Boston and Lowell. In a trailer for the movie, a cast of skateboarders do what they do best. They fly on their boards over stairs, railings, grassy hills, buildings, clouds; it is as if nothing is beyond the reach of their wheels. They do this not in a sound studio or generated on a computer screen. There is no high tech, no instruction manual or team, no coach and most of all no boundaries. It is the ethos of skating. Use what the urbanized world gives you and make it your plaything.

An Irish flag hangs next to the chalkboard of Elaine Weintraub’s history class at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.

Chinese lanterns dangle from the ceilings, Buddhist banners drape the walls and the faces of civil rights leaders adorn a sign that reads, “Positive history: Without black history there would be no history.”

Take a look at a Vineyard book shelf and you’re likely to find The History of Martha’s Vineyard by Charles Banks or Moraine to Marsh by Anne Hale. For conservationists, Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac published in 1949 is equally iconic. “I think anybody can be inspired by what he wrote,” Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation director Adam Moore said this week. “It’s one of the key pieces of literature in our environmental history in this country.”

On Saturday, Nov. 24, beginning at 4 p.m. the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center (located at the Tisbury Marketplace) is hosting a benefit screening of The Harvest. The event is to help Media Voices for Children, an Island non-profit organization that works to raise awareness of the needs of poor children in the U.S and around the world, through documentary film production, public advocacy and direct action.

Anything can happen in the movies, and the same could be said for a movie store — particularly if that store is Island Entertainment.

Longtime manager Jamie Alley’s DVD of choice for the last hour of business each night is typically an old Saturday Night Live episode.

“It’s a good way to fill the last hour, and it makes me laugh before I go home,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.