REMINISCING

Back in 2002 My wife and I were approaching our 60th anniversary and I decided to memorialize it by making a musical reminiscing over pictures from our past that I thought she would be able to remember.

Hattie, who suffered from Alzheimer's Disease, was approaching her 86th birthday. I was not able to get out and shoot new video or do much more than edit so I planned this movie to be made entirely in the house and mostly in my office where I do my editing.

Since movies are supposed to move and I had only still pictures to reminisce over, I decided to use a moving background. Several years earlier Hattie and I had enjoyed a cruise to the Mexican Riviera.

As our cruise ship was departing the port of Mazatlan I set my camcorder on a tripod near the stern and looking over the railing. The sea was calm as the ship slowly moved past the inner harbor and an island with a lighthouse on the top of a peak.

The words to Wind Beneath My Wings somehow had a specially meaning to me perhaps because of my career in aviation, or perhaps some passages reminded me of Hattie.

n any case I wanted the words to tell the story but vocalized words are hard to understand. So I decided to scroll the words across the bottom of the scene.

OK, that's the foundation for this movie now comes the reminiscing. I planned to do this by floating still pictures over the moving background using a feature on my Casablanca editor called Picture In Picture Studio.

It permits zooming and fading either in or out and even handles moving video scenes. Of course you can overlay multiple times to get more than one scene floating across the background, each with it's own attributes.

I also kept the scenes somewhat in keeping with the words of the music. All that is not an easy task even with this program but what the heck It is a hobby and I have nothing better to do.

Before entering the scenes in PIP I cropped them, enhanced the picture quality and added the appropriate date as text across the picture where it would not detract from the image.

I remembered that when I was in Sitka Alaska several years earlier I had recorded scenes of American bald eagles. Fortunately I found what I needed.

I decided to use only two live action float-in scenes, the starting and ending scenes with my wife. Fortunately the Alzheimer's Disease left her pleasant and cooperative and no spoken words were required.

In past years she always acted in my movies, usually as the star but of necessity her spoken lines were very limited, or off screen, or she was aided by a crib sheet but she was always a trooper. With the camcorder on a tripod and recording, we managed after numerous takes to get two nice scenes.

Because the music is by a well known artist I included her name and the source of the music in the credits and preceded the movie with the disclaimer illustrated.

I re-titled the movie as Wind Beneath My Wings, and entered it in LA Cinema Club's "music-video" contest in 2001. It won first place.

The movie is only about 5½ minutes long but that is a huge file to put on the Internet. I expect that streaming or the various codices to reduce file size would spoil the dreamy effect of the scenes floating across the background, so DVDs are the best I can do to share it.