So as I have received more and more
negative responses from the various national parks that I have applied to for
the winter (I just received another "no" from Jewel Cave yesterday),
I have begun to think about other possibilities of what I might do in the
spring. A few weeks ago I received an email from Invisible Children requesting
applicants to be "roadies" for their spring tour. It is something I
have thought about doing before, but never actually pursued. However, it might
actually be a possibility now because they need people from mid-January through
mid- April. So I decided to go ahead and apply. Well part of the application is
to submit a five minute video that tells them about yourself and addresses
several particular questions. In normal circumstances this would have been
fairly simple for me to pull off and a lot of fun to do. However, in my current
situation things are a bit more complicated because I do not have access to a
video camera or editing program. So I had to get pretty creative in order to
put it together.
Through the use of my digital camera
I was able to film little bits of video that allowed me to begin putting
something together. There is an old version of Windows Movie Maker on one of
the computers here, which is ridiculously hard to use and does not allow you to
do all sorts of things that I had taken for granted. So my original idea (which
was to have me driving and having a conversation with John Muir, who I was going
to put in the video as a still picture with my mouth talking, essentially
creating a talking head) was severely modified by the end. I also ran into all
sorts of other problems like not being able to have two different streams of
audio and not being able to superimpose pictures over video, things which it
never occurred to me I would not be able to do! I had selected several songs I
wanted to use, but the program decided not to read most of them and even when I
converted them to different file types (such as MP3 and WAV) they still didn't
work, so I had to go to plan H on the music! I had also found several
videos that I had taken in various different national parks including a great
shot of Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, a shot looking down Nevada
Falls, and footage in the redwoods which I was planning on using. But
after a great deal of arguing with the computer I finally conceded that it was
not going to read the files and I couldn't use them. So the video is
not good, is not anywhere near what I could have done, and is very different
from what was actually in my head originally, but it is still kind of fun to
watch. :)
This is the link on youtube (which
is how they wanted me to submit the video to them) where you can watch the
video. It should take you right to it.
I have also attached the
"script" of what I did for the video so that you can follow what I am
doing if you choose to do so. There are a few parts of the text that are no
longer in the video because I had to cut it down so that the video itself would
be less than 5 minutes long. So anyway, if you want to get a good laugh, take a
look at it!
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