"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."