This project all started because I was playing around with a new app, PIP Camera.  You know how one thing leads to another in DS106.

=> It’s time for DS106 video weeks.  YAY! My favorite digital storytelling medium.
=> I wanted to see what the Picture in Picture app could do.
=> As anyone knows who follows my projects, I have plenty of digital media of my grandson. And I’m not afraid to use it. 🙂
=> Nana’s Nightstand was born.

More often than not a family photo montage is interesting to the family being featured, but not so for everyone else.  Some of you may be old enough to still remember being made to sit through a meandering slide show of a relative’s family vacation.  BORING!  I’m a bit weird in that I’m one of those strange people who actually likes to look at other people’s pictures.  I think that’s because I enjoy looking for and learning about the story within the images.

In DS106 we are learning not just how to create with digital media techniques, but how to tell an engaging story.  In the making of Nana’s Nightstand I tried to do just that. My choices for photos are based on my feelings that each can tell a story that can be inquired into and shared beyond my little family unit.

Sure I had lots of images to choose from that I really liked.  Many were nice photos, just not very interesting.  A dozen pictures of a happy baby face is cute for the first few. But after that, who cares except for Nana, Mom & Dad. I also had the criteria that each of these would be a photo I’d have put in a frame at my bedside, in my office, as a screen saver, or in a special photo folder on my cellphone. They had to stand out to me and hopefully be captivating to another viewer.

 

A few of the stories that could use a little more fleshing out…

The opening image is of me on my birthday holding DJ and he’s only 20 days old. If you look closely you’ll see that he’s holding onto my finger too.  Awwww…….

At 0:40 this may look like just a happy baby face, which you aren’t bored with yet since it’s early in the video, but there is indeed a story behind it – the bib: “Daddy Loves Me”.  DJ’s daddy, Michael, is the primary caregiver, the stay-at-home dad. This photo is then followed by DJ touching a painted heron on the wall of his nursery that Michael painted.

 

At 1:37 DJ is in the midst of eating his first birthday cake.  I had wanted to place the animated GIF of him licking the good stuff off of his 2nd birthday candle immediately following so you’d really get what was going on, but that didn’t fit the linear journey through time story arc. (You did notice the ticking clock GIF on the nightstand throughout the video, right? The minute hand is even moving at a real clock speed until the credit roll. You can read below a quick summary of how I made that happen, with a more thorough production post to come.)

At 2:25 the now infamous Nana & DJ photo that his been riffed on a couple of times, resulting at this point-in-time to Talky Tina as Alan Levine’s grandma.

At 4:16 DJ is looking at the camera smiling with his tongue sticking out a bit.  If you could see the whole thing his shirt says “Little Guy, Big Temper” – perfect for a little guy just over two years old. And the tongue thing? We were playing with my iPhone, taking pictures of him on the back porch. (I think he may’ve even taken this shot.) I’ve noticed him sticking out his tongue lately when he’s concentrating on a task at hand.

 

I couldn’t figure out where he picked it up. Of course I assumed it was one of his parents.  But no….. While going through choosing the images I’d use for this video, lo-and-behold, I found the culprit.  It’s <gasp> Nana! I’d never noticed myself doing that before.  Did he inherit it from me? Or maybe I picked it up from him?

 

At 4:24 DJ is sitting in his wagon, which could be an interesting story in and of itself.  But look closer and you’ll notice that his jacket has a guitar on it. Nana plays 12-string guitar and he’s recently started picking up the wooden bellows by the fireplace pretending it’s a guitar. He also has an inflatable pink electric guitar he likes to play with.

 

At 4:38 DJ is munching on… get ready for it… a plastic brain. His Mom works in a neuroscience lab and is applying for grad school right now.  This is a teaching aid model of a real brain she brought home that you can open up with the parts labeled. (As a side note, my daughters played with molecular model sets like most kids play with Tinker Toys while growing up. Mixing of work with life is definitely a theme for me.

 

 

The final image at 4:52 of DJ in his Uffda! red shirt is currently my cellphone lock screen.  While one might assume this is just a Nana favored terrific toddler pic, there is more.  UFFDA! is heard uttered by Minnesota natives where we live. While other upper mid-west states use this phrase, to me it signifies being home in Minnesota. In all honesty, there are a few photos in the montage I admit are there simply because I love them.  After all, I’m the creator of this art piece and the power of the editing lays in my hands. 

Mad Scientist Evil Laugh

THE MAKING OF…

Remember at the top of my post talking about how one thing leads to another? While wandering around the Picture In Picture app I found a frame that was sitting on a bedside table amongst the many options the app provides. This led me to thinking about the photo of John Johnston’s grandfather that he talks about sitting on his Gran’s and later his mum’s sideboard in the DS106 Radio piece we produced a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t resist making an image for him.  And while I was at it I made some for Seth Goodman too. (Our fellow radio show collaborator @GoodmanSeth Twitter)  And guess what? When Seth received the photos he wrote back that his mom had just come out of a planned surgery and he was looking forward to showing them to her when she came out of the anesthesia. You can see all of the PIP images at the end of my radio show blog post, “Spinning Yarns for DS106 Radio”.

THE PROCESS

The process to create this video required quite a bit of fiddling around with different platforms, media, editing programs, etc. The original photos were dispersed amongst four different sites: my iPhone, iPad, computer, and a shared drive on my website.  Once I found what I was looking for, which was no easy task, using the Photo Transfer App I was able to easily download everything I needed onto my iPad which I found had the best user interface to make the picture in picture images. Once the framed images were created I uploaded them to my computer and imported them into Adobe Premiere Elements 12 for the Mac OS.  The final PIP images all have the same background.  So when you place them one after the other it looks like only the photo inside the frame is changing. The film dissolve transition worked well with this effect.

I’ve made a lot of these types of video montages before. But this time, after going through week 10 with the DS106 making of movies material, I was more aware of the point of interest in the images and where my eyes were drawn to. It seemed I was drawn to DJ’s eyes and face most of the time.  I watched the video carefully and noticed that in some spots I was moving up and down and up and down and it was a bit disorienting.  I decided to change the order or even replace some of the photos to create a more relaxed visual experience.

MAKING GIF TIME

There’ve been comments about the thoroughness of some of my posts when it comes to sharing my production notes. Since I do a lot of my learning by trial-and-error, it’s mostly about me wanting to capture in writing what I actually did to create something so that I can do it again next time.  [Tiptoeing Through HTML] That’s certainly the case here.  Making the animated clock GIF and getting it to all work well in the final video was rather complicated.  I’ve decided not to include it in this post.  But for me and others who are curious and want to learn how I did it, I’m in the process of creating a separate post to capture it all.

The short version:

1. Found an animated clock GIF on-line
2. Used Photoshop to copy out the clock faces from each layer
3. Made a new GIF with a transparent background
4. Overlayed the new clock face GIF into the video

Below is a screen shot of my Adobe Premiere Elements 12 video editor tracks. Starting from bottom to top …

1. Audio soundtracks
2. PIP Images
3. New clock face GIF
4. Animated GIF of DJ licking his 2nd birthday candle + Text for “Yum Brains”
5. Rolling text credits

AUDIO MEDIA SOURCES

Music Soundtrack: “First Steps” by General Fuzz

Evil Laugh – 5 by Nanakisan on Freesound.org

TEMPLATE FILES

Template files for download and use in your projects: Clock GIF with 25 frames that when held for 2.41 seconds each they produce a one minute GIF. [Photoshop PSD file]

The blue background inside the frame will allow you to use the video merge blue screen effects in more advanced video editing software.