the digitizing
I had just a little bit of socializing, virtually, over the weekend, so I guess I'll start there: Gabriel and Lea and I did our 2020 Movie Draft on Saturday evening. Several days earlier we had tentatively scheduled it for 7 p.m., and I texted them again earlier on Saturday to ask if there was any chance we could do it any earlier than that. Gabriel came back with an uncharacteristically "dad joke" response: At around 6:59? Absolutely! Hardy-har.
And then? He called me on FaceTime at 6:00! No communication about rescheduling prior to that, just a call at six. I have been digitizing the rest of my old home video cassettes, and luckily the portion I was recording literally ended right as he was calling. This process has been slightly more complicated than one would expect, just because I don't want to digitize anything I have already done. And I have worked on at least four projects over the past decade that have covered a fair portion but not all of my home video cassette inventory.
First was the Margaret June McQuilkin, In Memoriam video that I put together and shared the year Grandma died, in 2011. In the interest of saving time, I had only digitized all the home videos I had where Grandma was present. This did represent a lot of content, but was far from all the home videos I recorded, which was quite a lot. It was both most of the videos I recorded borrowing Grandma's own video camera in the early nineties, then a whole bunch between 1998, when I got the newer, much more compact camcorder Dad and Sherri got me as a college graduation gift; and around 2004, when the increased popularity of digital cameras made me far less likely to use the camcorder. (Ironically, I did not start recording a lot of digital video clips after that until the iPhone came along, or at least the first one I got, in 2008.) In any case, I have a pretty huge arsenal of home video recordings especially within the six-year period between 1998 and 2004.
After the 2011 video clips collection I made of Grandma in 2011, the next similar project I did was 20 Years with Gabe I Mean Gabriel, a much shorter, five-minute video collection which still necessitated digitizing all the home videos I had with Gabriel. And then much more recently, I did another two projects last year alone: digitizing all home videos with Mom present, so I could put together Dreaming of Jeanni: The Wendy Bird after the death of my mother. And finally, even though my cousin Heidi had died the previous year, at her sister Jennifer's request (quite late after said request) I put together all the raw home video footage of Heidi from the early nineties: Remembering Heidi - Raw Footage, covering 1992 and 1993. The Heidi one didn't take nearly as long to put together as I did no particularly creative editing, simply giving Jennifer all the home video footage I had with Heidi in it. It still came in at an hour and 27 minutes.
Anyway! Thus, before now, since 2011 I had digitized all home video featuring Grandma McQuilkin, Gabriel, Mom, and Heidi. Thing is, I probably have more home video footage of Danielle than anyone, and so she's making up the bulk of what I have left to digitize, which accounts for at least a couple dozen two-hour video cassettes (most of them the mini cassettes that go into the graduation-gift camcorder). This is because of the many times she visited me in Seattle between 1998 when I moved here and 2000 when she moved here, plus the long trips I took with her in the early 2000s, particularly the Millennium March on Washington in 2000. It's a lot simpler just to keep the digitizing software recording for two hours straight, but in many cases there are portions of cassettes already digitized from before, so I have to pay more attention and do it in separated chunks. I had one going this morning while I worked though, and at least that one was a full cassette I had not yet digitized. I'll sure be glad to get them all done, though; I have long thought about doing an edited Danielle collection, especially since by 2022, I will have known her for 35 years (although my home video footage will have dated back only 24 years). I do have talk tapes with her yet to digitize one of these days as well, and those date back to 1989; she was the first person I ever recorded one with.
I'll probably do one, one day, of Barbara, and I have other smaller projects in mind as well, all of them still necessitating getting all the rest of my tapes digitized. Just yesterday I did a video edit of Beth's visit to Seattle in 1999, of which I previously had only a very limited few photos; in this case I cut down 14 minutes of raw video footage to roughly four minutes. This did not take me long, and I posted it to Beth's Facebook page, surprising and/or delighting both her and Barbara (who is Beth's mom).
Once I have these all digitized, I can then cut them into smaller chunks using iMovie so I can upload them to Flickr, and fill out some old holiday collections where some holidays had no photos taken but did have some video taken. This will make the completist in me very happy, after more than a decade of wanting to do this and not getting it entirely finished. It's taken deaths in the family to get most of the digitizing done that I did before now.
Boy, I am really digressing, aren't I? What was I talking about? Oh right, Movie Draft with Gabriel and Lea! We were on FaceTime for maybe ninety minutes, before they had to sign off and make dinner. I sent the three lists to be voted on to Barbara for the second time, and she replied with astonishing speed, voting Gabriel's list #1! He was predictably thrilled, after she voted his list last, last time.
So, what else did I do over the weekend? Well, I already told you much of it: I've done a lot of digitizing home videos. I'll be working on this for a while, but I think I'll be pretty diligent with it from here on out. This is how I am with gargantuan projects: once I get into the swing of it, I see it through with no real breaks until the end. The same thing happened when I very first joined Flickr in 2005 and I scanned every single one of my printed photos from my life prior to then, so that all my photos would exist together online in my Flickr account.
I did take a walk to the library early Saturday afternoon, to pick up a couple of DVDs, and then I walked to Target and walked home. And! I did watch two different movies for review: The Little Things on Friday evening (not great: C+) and The Dig yesterday afternoon (good, not great: solid B). I still also watched two other movies this weekend as well, both of these with Shobhit and being movies checked out of the library: we watched Edge of Tomorrow on Saturday night and last night we watched Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie that is already five years old and which still holds up, I believe, as one of the greatest action movies ever made. I really love how most of the movie was made with practical effects. It really makes a difference.
I guess now I should really try and get some work done today.
[posted 12:33 pm]