As I've mentioned before, I spent last Monday through Friday in Louisville at the Galt House at an educational technology conference. My original plan was that when I got back to my hotel room in the evenings I would get on the Internet and check my email and do whatever work I could remotely so that I wouldn't be behind when I came back to work. However, the wireless network at the Galt House was not prepared for hundreds of techy geeks to be on their laptops, all presumably trying to do the same thing I was attempting to do. As a result, the wireless network CRAWLED...if I could connect at all.
So what did I do to pass the time? I took out five blank sheets of paper and drew the keys of a piano on them, and then I fired up a program on my laptop called Finale Notepad. It used to be* a free music composition program, and it had the benefit of allowing the composer to export as a MIDI file whatever music he/she composed in the program.
I (poorly) self-taught myself to play the piano when I was in high school, and I also dabbled in composing music. But back then I never took the time to write down ANYTHING that I composed musically. I just memorized it and went on with it. Occasionally I'd pull out a cassette recorder and tape what I was playing, and that was my way of documenting it. As a result, I have a couple of tapes of music to this day, but when I play those tapes I'm amazed to realize I no longer know how to play about half of the pieces.
So during the evenings last week I put into Finale Notepad the first piece of music that I ever composed. I was 15 when I wrote the piece that is in the YouTube video below. At the time it was only the piano part. I added the other parts in my head over the years as I'd hum the piece while fixing dinner or painting a room or mowing the yard. So I finally had the time last week to put it down "on paper." And the computer "played" it for me. It doesn't exactly sound like real instruments, but hey! What are you wanting from a (used to be*) free program!
Yesterday I wrote a post very early in the morning saying that--for the first time since I painted the basement two years ago--I had the house to myself for an entire day, and I was going to do whatever I wanted. Below is what I decided to do: I worked on a movie.
My father passed away almost a year ago, and the day he died I posted a couple of videos on this blog. As I mentioned at the time, they were proofs of concept for a documentary about my family that I wanted to make. But until my father died, I hadn't done anything else other than make the two short videos. I'd planned to get started on it, but I kept putting it off. Soon after he died, I browsed through the files on my computer and found the raw audio files of the day I'd separately recorded him and my mother talking. The audio files were simultaneously comforting and depressing--comforting because they gave me a chance to hear my father's voice again, and depressing because very little of what was on those files was anything I wanted to hear about. I wish, instead of asking him about his childhood and his parents and his school, I'd asked him when he'd been the proudest of me, or what was his favorite story about Christmas with us kids, or something like that.
In any event, I listened to the audio and decided that I needed to take what was there and put it into a documentary format similar to the first two movies for my family, but I've kept letting the time slip by. At first I thought maybe I could get that done by my mother's birthday on January 1, but honestly the month of December last year was kind of a blur for me, so that day slipped past. Then I thought maybe I could get it done by Father's day in June, but I kept putting it off and putting it off and that day passed by, too. Then I aimed for my father's birthday, but that was last Thursday, and I didn't have it finished then. So I sat down yesterday morning and decided that I was going to stay at the computer until I got SOMETHING down in a format that I could share.
I started by recording several pieces of music in several intervals (full length, 10 seconds in length, 15 seconds in length, etc.). When I make these movies I don't want to have to worry about copyright, so I figured the easiest way to do that was to take original compositions and record them. I'm not a very skilled guitarist, and I don't even have a piano anymore, but no worries--I stuck my webcam with a USB microphone on my guitar and plucked an original tune as best I could, and then I used a program called Finale Notepad to transcribe a few other original pieces and then exported all of that into MP3's using a program called Audacity. None of it was professional grade stuff, but it was going to be pushed way into the background, mostly to cover background noise that I couldn't get out of the original audio. Took the better part of the morning to get that done.
After lunch, I started editing the audio. In the end, I found there were four basic stories I could tell in all of the raw audio: 1) My father's childhood, 2) My father's schooling, 3) His work history, and 4) some final comments he made after I'd originally turned off the microphone--he asked me to turn it back on so he could say just a couple more things. I managed to finish the voice editing for numbers 1 and 3 (which wasn't easy--I'd forgotten that when I recorded my dad I'd forgotten to turn up the gain on the microphone attached to the computer. As a result, the audio had a terrible hiss in it that I had to use Audacity to get out), even added the music to number 1. Then I went to add photos, hoping to finish at least section one yesterday, but I discovered that I had NO photos for the last 2/3 of the short video. So I'm writing today with a plea: The video is below, and if you are family and have photos of my dad or his family that my fit into this movie, let me know.
I'd really like to finish this thing before Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or NEXT Father's Day. Or...
