This is my first time ever participating in Bloganuary, and I’m a day late to the party. This year’s first question is, “What are your biggest challenges?” I’m really going to just focus on one here, and that is: Finishing things.
Take Bloganuary, for example. I’ll tell you right now, there is not a snowball’s chance in Florida that I am going to finish WordPress’s challenge to write one themed post every day. I’m not even going to pretend that I will. Never in my life have I finished any sort of daily challenge–even seemingly fun and easy ones like naming a different favorite song each day of the month. But because this one also seems fun, I promise to participate on the days that I am able. That’s all I can give you.
I have an awful lot of unfinished projects. From the pile of clean laundry sitting on the end of my bed, to the folders full of notes and research for books I am (I swear) going to write someday, to countless other projects of varying forms of creativity that I think about a lot and do absolutely nothing with, my life is defined by never finishing things.
But at the end of 2023, just in time for Christmas, I finally finished some things–BIG things–and am feeling pretty proud of myself. I spent most of my free time and quite a bit of my sleeping time working on these two projects for the last two and three years respectively. Now that they’re out of the way and I’ve assured myself I really can do it if I try, I can get to work on this list of other unfinished projects currently sitting in my Asana crying, “Pick me! Pick me!”
Project 1: Home Videos
The first project I finished, the two-year one, was family home videos. I hired Miguel at Home Video Studio to digitize our remaining home videos from VHS and 8mm so I could work with them on my computer. Then I taught myself Adobe Premiere Pro from scratch.
The first thing I did as I was learning Adobe Premiere Pro was to create a title sequence set to the Full House theme. I actually sat and watched the longer version of the show’s intro, stopping and starting over and over, writing down exactly what happens at every single second. Then I replicated it. I even found a Full House font to introduce everyone.
I cut long sections of recording into individual “scenes” and dated and chronologized them as best I could. (My parents, in the past, made this a lot easier on me, as they opened many scenes by saying, “Today is XX-XX-XXXX”. Thinking ahead! In a few cases I had to be creative, like zooming in on the calendar on the wall in one of the scenes.) I created intro slides for each separate scene and put cute titles on them, along with the date, using Adobe stock footage from our hometown and the surrounding areas. These I set to music–Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring“, which I know from Milo and Otis.
For fun, I added in some old recorded content from the Disney Channel’s glory days, as well as some old commercials from the era. (As a kid, I always loved the Big Red Gum jingle–so catchy. So for a laugh my family will discover upon watching all this, I got every version of this commercial I could find through the years and nestled them in between scenes taking place around the same time periods. Check out this version with Bryan Cranston from 1991.)
The last thing I did was to recut everything into 45ish-minute segments–roughly the length of one episode of television. There were 14 of these in all. It was a lot.
If you have old home videos sitting around on VHS or other outdated format, I highly recommend using a service like Miguel’s as soon as you possibly can. If you aren’t aware, VHS fades with every use. It also fades just with time alone. Even if you don’t go through all these extra steps I did, just have them digitized while you still can. Trust me, one day you are going to wish more than anything that you had endless video of your loved ones. One day, no amount of video will replace their presence in your life, once they are gone. But having some will help keep the memory of their face, voice, body language, and personality alive. Save your footage before it’s too late.
Project 2: Family Saga
The second project I finished in December, this time after three years, is a book. But I didn’t write it. Decades before I was born, my great-grandaunt wrote a family memoir and never published it. She titled this work Family Saga. When I was growing up, we made a photocopy of the original typewritten version. I borrowed that from my mom and typed it onto my computer to create the first digital copy so I could print a smaller version for myself.
Because her father (my great-great-grandfather) was a governor, this work is chock full of anecdotes about all kinds of famous people from history, including some presidents, that are unknown outside of our family. This fascinated me, and I found myself Googling absolutely everything and everyone she mentioned for my own photographic reference.
Since I was also proofreading and editing, I did a ton of research. Not only into our own family history, but into the historical events and people she mentioned. Sometimes she used pseudonyms or left people anonymous, and I spent up to weeks at a time trying to find people. Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com were extremely helpful in my searches. I even used ChatGPT a couple of times to point me in the right direction.
At some point, I decided to I download the pictures I found and print an illustrated copy. I painstakingly uploaded each and every image to Ancestry and used their colorizing tool on all of them. I added an index, a table of contents, biographical and editorial notes, acknowledgments, and an editor’s note. Lastly, I used Canva to create a cover and printed the entire thing (which worked out to nearly 500 pages!) on Lulu.
Looking Forward
So I outdid myself this past year and finished two massive undertakings at once. And now that they’re done, I can move onto the next thing. I now know that I am highly capable of taking on a huge project and ultimately finishing it. I’ve had so much on the backburner for so long that I’m not sure what I’m going to start with. But I’m excited nonetheless.
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