Making of the video

Equipment:

• Camera: Olympus VG120 pocket camera
• Software: PowerDirector 10

This video is made from five video snippets and three stills.

This one required some work adjusting both video and sound. As is normal in my work, the timeline in the final video is not the real sequence of events. In fact the ending was actually the first video shot that morning. This is the artistic licence one gets in creating one's own story. No one else will tell the story in the same sequence or manner you would yourself. That's the fun and joy of producing your own video.

The exposure of one segment came out a little darker than the others. A good video editor will enable you to make corrections. I lightened the strip by 8%. However, when you adjust brightness, contrast suffers a little. I therefore increased contrast by 7%. This made that segment merge perfectly with the rest.

Due to the rather hard acoustics of the room – low ceiling and one side full glass – the high frequencies came through too loud and harsh. WaveEditor, part of the PowerDirector suite, allowed me to reduce the level in an increasing slope beginning at 5kHz. I applied this to the whole video.

Sometimes you have an image you would like to use but it somehow doesn't quite fit in with the story. That's what I had with this shot of two cheeky nieces. I just had to include it as it was taken during the event. Decided to put it in as a computer glitch that somehow "accidentally" threw this shot in. Showing it too long will take away the glitch effect, so I reduced it's duration to only 3 seconds.

The final scene shows Julianne, her pregnant cousin (big age difference) and her Godma (my wife, Rebecca) that ends with a great closing shot.

Lovely Julianne is such a natural and attends dance school. I simply had to end with her sponteneous courtsey and had a difficult time deciding if I should overlay the "Happy Birthday" bit. Well, after all, it's her birthday!