i am my hair
I spent the majority of my evening last night working on yet another video. This one was not a memorial like the 20-minute one (okay it's closer to 19) I made honoring Auntie Rose, but this one was for Gina.
She turns 50 on Saturday, when we'll be going to Olympia for her birthday party. I had made a "50 Years 50 Angels" video for Angel when she turned 50 two years ago . . . and actually hadn't really thought about it in reference to Gina's birthday. But, when we hung out with Angel on Sunday morning, she brought it up: "Are you going to make a video for Gina like the one you made for me?"
Oh. Right. Well, having made one for Angel and not making one for Gina would be bad form, clearly. We can't have that!
Both of them are briefer than usual videos; in each case kind of a form of music video. Angel's is 3 minutes and 19 seconds, the length of the song I chose, "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac, chosen for two reasons. First, Angel and Gina and I all have a shared history of love for Fleetwood Mac, and we all went to their stupendous reunion tour together in 1997. And second, it's a perfectly wistful song for the purposes of acknowledging the passage of time.
My approach for Gina's is a bit different. After digitizing all of my old home videos earlier this year, I have far easier access to older home video clips. I had already shared one a few months back, while in the midst of the digitizing project, that was of Gina in, I think, 1998. She commented on how wildly varied her hairstyles have been over the years. So, that's basically the theme of the video I'm making for her: "50 Years / 50 Hairstyles." And, while Angel's video simply featured fifty still photos of her from throughout her life, the one I'm making for Gina features just over half of it being still photos, and the rest being video clips.
The song I chose is Lady Gaga's "Hair," from her 2011 album Born This Way. There is no shared history of fandom regarding Lady Gaga, but among my music library it was the most directly applicable song for the theme I was going for.
And because I spent so much time working on it last night, it's essentially done already. I did have to re-digitize about ten minutes' worth of Dad's 37th birthday party in 1992 so I could capture a couple brief clips of Gina in there, which I discovered to have somehow skipped when I did all my digitizing in the spring. So, I have just a few still photos from her childhood, but that is the earliest video clip I've got—and, I figured out, she's all of 20 in those clips! So, the video clips alone of her that I have run the gamut of about thirty years. Amazing.
I was in bed just after 11:00 last night because I got so involved in working on that video, which has a few subtle elements I have never incorporated into one of these videos before. There's a lot more zooming even among the video clips, always in an effort to highlight Gina's hairstyles. I even added a very brief bit of voiceover narration near the beginning. I think I want to redo the title card before I finalize the video and export it to my files, but I've got a few days to consider any tinkering. That's always a challenge, deciding when I'm truly done and won't need to do any more tweaks of any kind.
I did break for a little bit last night to watch just a couple episodes of Schitt's Creek with Shobhit. Otherwise, I spent the majority of the evening in the bedroom working on that video.
I did eat dinner with Shobhit in the living room before that, though. We made a pizza out of an Afghan flatbread we bought at an Asian grocery store Shobhit is now deciding might be his new favorite, in Renton on our way back from Kanaskat-Palmer State Park on Saturday. Sachin had told him about it, bringing us that same bread a couple of visits ago. The bread is super soft and, though not really designed to be a pizza crust, we thought it might be fun to try and make it one.
We each had only a quarter of it. The calorie content of even that must have been massive. I was finally back under 160 lbs yesterday morning but today I'm above it yet again. And, I saved the other quarter of it to have for dinner tonight. Getting old and having a slowing metabolism while struggling with overeating to begin with . . . it's a real pain in the ass.
[posted 12:30 pm]