Well, it’s taken a lot of time, a lot of work and a lot of cooperation from the kids, but we finally have our 2007 Christmas video/website up and running. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s located here. My best estimate is that we’ve spent about 60 hours making the video (if you count the whole family’s time), and collected about 10GB of video and photos, all to make a 5 minute presentation.
We took our inspiration from a couple of places this year and combined them for the video. The first inspiration came when I realized in October how much digital scrapbooking is going on these days on the internet. I have been creating digital scrapbooks of our vacation for the last couple of years, but I didn’t realize how much good content — digital papers, picture elements, fonts, etc. — is being developed by hobbyists and shared freely on the net. I decided to take bits and piece of this, add my own bits and combine them all to make a digital scrapbook.
If you are the least bit interested in digital scrapbooking, I’d recommend checking out “Digifree”, a blog that collects daily links to scrapbooking “freebies”. There are usually 100 or more links every day. Many of the graphical elements I used in the video were found this way.
The second inspiration came from a Christmas music video by Heidi Klum called “Wonderland”. The song is kind of what you’d expect from someone whose day job is not really music-related, but the video gave me the idea of animating the backgrounds (the digital scrapbook “papers”) to make the video more interesting visually.
I took advantage of the scrapbook format to create the video in “semi-HD”. All of the video we have is in standard definition, but putting these video elements into blocks on the screen allowed me to make the video itself significantly higher resolution. The main video is 800×800, which gives it a square format similar to most scrapbooks.
I hope you like what you see. It was fun (mostly) to create, and I’m pretty happy with the result.
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