Kudos to My Dad

For as long as I can remember, every time there has been a milestone special occasion in our family, my dad has made a this-is-your-life type of video.  Birthdays, graduations, weddings... Back before digital video editing, this meant taking a video camera and recording pictures one by one from a photo album to get the video and then adding titles with paper and adding music.  Most recently, my dad made me one of these videos for my bridal shower.

 

Up until just a few weeks ago, I didn't fully appreciate what goes into making these videos.  I loved watching them, and I always had something critical to say about them.  My dad used too many pictures from the same occasion, or he let a video clip run too long...  Well, NO LONGER!!

Why?  Because I have spent the past several weeks working on a video for my dad's 70th birthday.  Actually, the process started in late September when my mom and I did a three day data gathering party while my dad was in Israel.  I flew up to San Jose and for three days I sat in front of my dad's computer looking through seventy years of photos.  In the meantime, my mom had been working nonstop the week before I got there to convert all sorts of vhs and 8mm videos to digital so that I could use them.  After that trip I sort of let making the video take a backseat to other stuff going on in my life.

Thanksgiving week I started working on the video.  I've pretty much done no video editing in my life save for one class I took in college using antiquated equipment.  I certainly haven't done any digital video editing, and  I wasn't really sure where to start.  Thankfully, we have access to a Mac laptop which has iMovie built in to it.  I started playing around with iMovie and eventually figured out the best way to go about creating the project.  I decided to put the pictures in chronological order, which was somewhat challenging with the early pictures of my dad's life, so I did a lot of guessing.  I had a total of over 800 pictures to use, and video on top of that.  Once I got all the pictures and videos where I wanted them, I went through and weeded out a bunch to make the video shorter.  And then did that again.  And then I went through each picture individually and made sure that the effects for each shot worked right.  Then came adding transitions, music, and titles.  It all sounds quite simple when written out here, and it took *countless* hours to do!  Partly it's tedious work, and partly I'm a perfectionist.  I don't want the movie to be too long, I don't want it to be boring, I want to make sure my dad will love it...

My goal was to have the video finished by tonight.  This Saturday Donovan and I are flying up to San Jose and on Saturday night we're having a mini birthday party for my dad where we're going to show the video.  Even yesterday I had my doubts about getting it done in time.  But...guess what?  Tonight I finished the movie!  Mostly.  I'm going to export it and see how it does, and see if there are things I need to change.  I'd say it's 99.5% done.  :)

The moral of the story is...I have a whole new level of respect for my dad for making those videos for every special occasion for so many years.  My hat off to you, sir!!!

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