Making movies

For about the last year or so, I have had the desire to use the pictures I have taken with my digital camera to create a slide show that would tell the story of the year 2004. Well that thought has remained just that - a thought - until this past weekend.

My girlfriend's mom (I'll call her GFM) complained about my digital camera. She said that once I transfer the pictures from my camera to my computer, she doesn't get to see the pictures. At least with a conventional camera she gets to see photos.

Well, feeling a need to defend the honour of my maligned digital camera, I became inspired to take action. A conventional camera more useful than a digital? Let me show you what can be done with digital, I thought. Off to my computer I went and fired up Windows Movie Maker.

My goal was to create a slide show using last year's Christmas photos, add a soundtrack, save it as a video and hope we'd be able to play it back on GFM's DVD player. The song I had in mind was Pachelbel's Canon. It's a well recognized song and is often played around Christmas time, so I thought it would be well suited to the subject matter.

I have two different cd's that each have a different arrangement of this song. One was on a Solitudes cd that was in the basement. The other was a cd that was in my car, outside in sub-zero temperature. I tried the Solitudes version first but it just didn't work. It has a long intro of the sound of waves, and the dynamics were just too low key. It's a great track for solitude and meditation, but not suitable for what I had in mind.

The other version was on the Trans-Siberian Orchestra cd The Lost Christmas Eve that was in my car. So I bundled up and trundled out into the cold and brought in the cd. It was a labour of love.

It was well worth the trek outside into nature's freezer. The TSO arrangement (called Christmas Canon Rock) is punchier, and has some wonderfully dramatic transitions. The part of the song where the vocals come in just happened to coincide with where we put pictures of my girlfriend's sister and her family ("We are waiting, We have not forgotten") and it just has an amazing impact. My girlfriend said "My mom is going to cry when she sees this."

It was pretty late at night when we finally finished this production. All in all, we'd spent about three hours putting together this six minute video, but I am totally pleased with it - and the TSO Canon song is still running through my head several days later.