Whew!  I finally started uploading the video this morning about 3:45am.  We didn’t get to start on the video as early as we usually do, so I was doing some scrambling last night to put the final touches on it.

We’ve done little bits of stop motion animation in the past, but we went all out this year.  We were inspired by the video that won the Amazon Kindle contest this year to give it a try.  I like how it turned out — the style reminds me a little bit of watching Sesame  Street as a child.

Also new this year is the music.  Normally, we spend a lot of time trying to pick out a song for the video.  This process often starts before summer is over, and can last months.  This year, I decided to write the music (with a little help from John Lennon at the end).  This turned out to be a life saver as the deadline approached because I didn’t have time to design a website like I have in the past and writing your own music is the only way to guarantee that you can get past the copyright police at YouTube.

So without further ado (we strongly recommend you watch full screen):

A few notes:

The stop motion animation is composed from about 300 pictures drawn from about 500 or so source frames. We mounted the camera on the ceiling of our basement. Sandi did the principal photography and I assembled the animation sequences in Photoshop.

This is the 10th video we’ve done — the first was in 2000, when Carissa was about 18 months old. The timeline sequence at the beginning is all of the Christmas cards we’ve sent beginning the year Carissa was born.

The verses of the song are sung (in order) by Sadie, Celia and Carissa. We didn’t have time to put this into the credits.

ICE! is an annual exhibit at the Gaylord Opryland resort in Nashville. It’s surprisingly expensive and the whole exhibit is kept at 10 degrees Fahrenheit which has the effect of making you want to get through it as quickly as possible! Still, it was pretty impressive and we enjoyed the Charlie Brown theme.

This is also the 10th year that Sandi has done a gingerbread house, and like our video, the degree of difficulty seems to keep going up every year. I thought about doing a montage of the houses in the video, but there wasn’t enough time to squeeze them in. Instead you get pictures of the first one and most recent one.

The girl’s gingerbread party has also become a tradition in our house. It started in 2004 when we were in France and Sandi got the idea to share the art of gingerbread house decorating with some of our kid’s friends there. Gingerbread is not especially common in much of France, which seems odd given their proximity to Germany. Now we have the gingerbread party at Christmas time instead of having three big birthday parties during the year.

We visited Franklin as part of our trip to Nashville. My cousin Amy lives in town and we dragged her and her family to the Franklin Dickens Days celebration. The girls enjoyed the folk dancing in particular.

And yes, Sadie did her entire school program in her PJs.

We also made a trip to the IMA for their “Longest Night” celebration where we saw ice sculptures being made, toured the Lily house decorated in the style of 1943, and Carissa even kissed a real reindeer. None of the pictures or video turned out well enough to use though. (It was pretty dark after all).

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