A few years ago, 2004, I decided I wanted to utilize my amateur video making skills and create something for my Dad for Fathers Day. I actually started planning months in advance. I noticed that there was this large stack of photos my Dad had been planning on having scanned so he can have a digital library. Most of the photos, if not all of them, starred him and they went back as far as him being 1 month old. I'd seen these photos several times when I would come to visit lying in a clear plastic bag waiting for something to be done with them and always in the same spot.
I went over to their house one day (probably sometime in March) and had my Mom gather all the pictures she could that had my Dad in them and I took most of them with me. At this time I didn't have a scanner at home but my Mother-In-Law had a pretty nice one. I arranged with her to come over after work for several days to scan photos. I scanned about 300 photos in the best resolution possible and saved them to my portable hard drive then later burned them to a DVD when I got them home. All the pictures I scanned in high resolution were pretty large and took up a few gigabytes worth of space. This was the first part of the Father's Day present.
I sifted through all these photos and found themes amongst groups of them and started by putting them in a somewhat chronological order for presentation. I included transitions between each one and a few effects to add to the feeling I was trying to impress. I put them together, added music that I had to do a little bit of editing too as well (mostly for appropriate length) and made the pictures fit with the words.
The very last group of photos was put together to go along with a song I had found a year or so before and had played for my Dad the previous Fathers Day. It's by a group called 2NU or now 2NU2 and it's appropriately called "A Father's Day". They are actually a band local to here and had a song on the radio in the 80's called "This Is Ponderous" that was unique and catchy. Along with most of their "songs", it's more like a story told to music as it's not really sung and doesn't always have a "chorus" so to speak.
Anyway, I consider this one of the best pieces of work I've done so far and it doesn't contain 1 second of actual video as it's just a somewhat slightly fancy slideshow. It may not be great to many others but it was a custom bit of work that means alot to me and is quite moving to my immediate family. I think it almost made my Dad cry and when I watched it again recently, it's not hard for me to understand why. I give most of the credit to the music artists because as George Lucas once said, "The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie," (qtd., IMDb). This is very true in this short 14 and a half minute video and even more so for this clip if you know my Dad or our family very well.
After presenting this to my Dad and the rest of my family, they were impressed. I don't think it was the quality of the work that was so great but that this little clip seemed to capture my Dad's life so well. I don't mean to present this to you as a method for "tooting my own horn" so to speak but so that you may share in some of the enjoyment others have as they've watched this. My brothers claimed that this is what we'll be playing at his funeral, which I hope is many years from in the future.
So without furuther ado, Father's Day:
Google Video:
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