This is a short movie that I created and presented to Linda, on the kid's first birthday, as a DVD. I've also set a copy aside for each of them as keepsakes. I anticipate adding more segments over the years. Turn up the sound and listen carefully, as the music fits the visuals.
DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS...
If you're viewing this, you're considered family or friends. Please DO NOT share the url and password to this page. If you want to be sure I sent it to somebody, drop me a note and I'll do so on your behalf. Thank you for protecting our online privacy.
This will only be online for a short time. If you really like it enough that you'd like a copy, I certainly won't stand between your constant viewing of my kids :-). say the word and I'd be proud to drop a copy in the mail and send it your way.
BEHIND THE SCENES...
The most frequent response has been 'YOU did that?', followed by 'HOW?' It took about 60hrs of work, including exhaustive research to find the right songs to fit the vision and hours spent scouring through video tapes, and it's less than 1/2 the original concept. I'm kinda glad I had a time limit. I'd never done any of this before and had a lot of learning to do.
Some of the movies were shot on a Canon S300, a digital photo camera which shoots low quality mini-movies. They don't do well in the full screen, as you'll see, but were great for the credits section.
The entire project was done on a Mac. I used iMovie to put the movie together, backing up frequently, and fretting compulsively over timing the transitions to the beat. I had to customize and manipulate portions of the music tracks [Elton John: "Blessed", Talking Heads: "This Must Be The Place" and Green Day: "The Time of Your Life" and Dave Matthews "Everyday"], and I used SoundStudio to do so. The end credits required a $3.50 purchase of the 'multiple movies' plugin from cf/x. I made an awesome menu in iDVD [not shown here] and after a few frustrated attempts, overcame a low profile but documented bug regarding audio being out of sync. I did so by exporting the final iMovie project to a full quality quicktime file, completely extracting the finished audio track as one complete 'song', turning down and/or removing all sound from the movie tracks, and overlaying the single audio track over the complete movie. If this were the olympics I'd be looking for mid 9's. :-)
If it's slow or sputters while playing, allow it to fully load, or right-click and save the movie to your hard drive. [cmd-click if you're lucky enough to be using a mac]