"When my daughter Vienna told me she wanted to make her own "Journey" video, I was determined to make HER do it. I was as honest as possible with her: "I'm happy to teach you, but you have to do ALL of it. If you keep working hard, I'll happily get you a laptop and software to keep it going - but I CANNOT do this for you. It's hard enough to do my own... So, write down what you want to say and imagine what the viewers will see while you're talking.” That was about 3 weeks ago... and she just couldn't process it, but I wouldn't budge. She had to do this by herself, I would NOT be doing it.

She finally finished it and to my surprise (other than being extremely complicated) it needed very little editing. I typed it for her on my phone and let her make her own voice-over. She read it twice and then I made her little ass DRAG THOSE FILES into Premiere and labored over how to cut out mistakes and make it sound like one nice take...

Then? "Here's a camera kid, shoot what you wrote."

She did it and asked if she could use pictures for the parts she couldn't film. I said she could google the words and find some pictures... and I explained how copyright worked and that it may keep her from ever making money with this video. She was cool with that. I made her save the files herself and then the arduous task of taking the video files off the camera, naming them and bringing them into the timeline.

Holy shit this took a long time for her, but she was determined.

Then it was a matter of her mastering a mouse and placing the pictures and video clips on top of the voice-over. This poor girl. I'm such an asshole. I would show her how to do one... then she had to do the rest.

Then of course? Music. Nope, can't use any pre-existing music - ya gotta make up your own. So I bring out the keyboard and let her look for sounds and she comes across JUNO Pop which was an arpeggio sound where you hit one note and it plays it out for you. I told her to listen to the rhythm and change notes VERY SLOWLY and it'll work. She pulled it off beautifully. I recorded her playing and that is the piece you hear under this video.

I gave her some advice on how to speed up or slow down some footage to fit within her voice-over and music... and this kid really did knock this out.

Now, I have no idea if she'll continue doing this, because it was indeed a ridiculous amount of work for her (and such a complicated video to start with) but she now understands how what she wrote translated to video. Which means the next time she tries this she will write differently... and so on, and so on, and so on...

I couldn't be more proud, her mom is gonna cry her eyes out and I adore how absolutely WEIRD this is... but also seemingly very professional. I told her when she was editing without music that just adding that will make this seem like someone else did it. It really is the finishing touch and she was stunned at the result.

It's SOOOO her. She even got better with camera placement as she kept working (look at the dancing portion compared to the beat saber part). Oh and for that? I told her to YouTube "Imagine Dragons Warriors Beat Saber Hard" and boom it came up. Taught her how to capture the screen and then told her how to sync the two up. Told her we'd need to make it smaller to fit on-screen and she even used her math skills to figure out the percentage of size to fit in the video. It was as if everything in her 8 years came together (with support, but less than you'd imagine) and here it is.

So, Happy Mother's Day Talya! Wasn't sure I'd get this uploaded in time but we did it! SHE DID IT!! This is the sweetest thing ever."