A+Cautionary+Tale

Our cautionary tale concerns Rick, just an average guy, getting ready to make his first digital story: “What a great morning,” thought Rick, stepping out his back door and going to the little studio he had cleared out of a corner in his garage. “Today, I become a filmmaker. I am going to make my first digital story this weekend. Today, I’ll assemble all the material I need. Tomorrow, I’ll edit it all together.”

Rick’s story was a tribute to his parents. Their 40th wedding anniversary was in a week, and he had a great idea about a retrospective on their lives. He had taken two large boxes of photos and a few old 8 mm films from his parent’s home earlier in the week. He was confident that if he could just sort through the stuff, the story would write itself. “I know that’s how Ken Burns does it, just gather all the sources and piece it together like a puzzle.” He had his computer fired up. He had a scanner and digital camera handy, and the video camera set up on a tripod next to the old 8 mm projector. He was going to project the film against a sheet he had hung on the wall and then record it. “Ingenious,” he thought to himself.

The day began smoothly. Rick organized the photos into piles representing five decades of his parent’s life together. “These are great,” he thought. “I’ll scan these eight from the 1950s, and these twelve from the 1960s, but the ones from the 1970s, when I was born, there are at least thirty of these I have got to use.” And on it went. The piles grew, but no scanning yet. He broke for lunch.

Then came the film. “Old 8 mm film is really beautiful, isn’t it?” he thought. “My parents are going to love this part when I had my first little swimming pool. Wow. I’ll just transfer it all, and then make my selections tomorrow during the edit.” Despite a few glitches in the camera, he eventually got it right, and by 4 pm, the video was recorded on the camera. He thought about taking notes about which sections were on his two- hour tape, but since he was having so much fun reminiscing he never got around to it.

“I have to find the right music—old show tunes and stuff. And I need a few archival images, and I bet I can find that stuff on the Internet.” After dinner he got online, and around 11 pm his eyes grew tired and his hand had gone numb. But he had everything he needed—just all in one big folder on the computer.

Rick woke up in the middle of the night and opened his eyes. “...The part where they are looking out over the Grand Canyon ... I can cut to a shot of me digging myself into the sandbox when I was three. That will be so cool. I can’t wait to start.”

The next day, he scanned his images, played with Photoshop, and he captured so much video on his computer that he ran out of hard drive space. He played with his morphing software. He did everything but start on the story. Sunday evening came and it was still a big mess. The workweek was a nightmare, so he only had a few hours to actually edit.

When the event approached on Saturday, the best thing he came up with was an extended music video, fourteen minutes long, with whole sections of images, film and titles bumping, flipping, and gyrating for reasons unknown. Several of his parents’ friends fell asleep during the showing, and at the end there was a spattering of applause. Rick attributed the reaction to the heaviness of the gravy on the chicken stroganoff that was served at the dinner.

His mother, of course, cried through the whole thing. His father, always supportive, thanked him, and said, “Rick, that was, well, really ... interesting.”