Welcome to my IT 810 Project 3 - Video Podcast page. For this week's assignment, I have created a memorial video for my father who passed away as I was taking this course. My time for this project was short, yet it was one of the most important projects I may ever create. I only had about two days to put this memorial video together and was constrained by a five minute time limit for the funeral. I used various programs including: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Premiere Pro. Enjoy!

For this project, it was important to me to be able to tell the main parts of my father's life story in a way that would speak to anyone who came to his funeral. I wanted to help people understand him better beyond their own context while at the same time, avoid overburdening people's auditory or visual channels with the chatter of constant narration or redundant text, especially for those whose grief was intense. I wanted for the experience to also feel more like a celebration of my father's life rather than focusing on a sad, final two-week chapter of his life which culminated in his death. As I sat at the front of the church, I could hear his old friends chuckling and the occasional mutterings of happy recognition of certain life events with friends and family. It was a wonderful thing to be able to honor my dad in this way.

I created this video using Adobe Premiere Pro. The three sound and music files were downloaded from Audioblocks.com and are royalty free. After creating a list of key information I wanted to place in the video, I created blank, black images for the beginning and the ending of the video. I also created composite images using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks with poetry or text to introduce the various chapters of major life events represented within the video. The recommended frame sizes for graphics for HD video are 1280x720 and 1920x1080. I decided to use the 1280x720 for this project's purpose given I planned to upload the video to YouTube for others to view in the event they were unable to attend the funeral.

I searched through many photographs and digital files of converted 8mm, family movies to find the material used in this video. I used Photoshop to adjust exposure, sharpen and repair digital images that were created by scanning old, often discolored, printed photographs. For each graphic or photograph slide placed on the Premiere Pro timeline, I set a duration of 3 seconds. I used a one second cross-dissolve transition between slides. I coordinated the initiation of audio files with the appearance of the first slide of major life events. I set the audio gain to -25 dB for the first "stinger" which corresponds to my personal logo and subsequently set the audio gain to -20 dB for the two music files in the video. Finally, I chose to end the video presentation with a composite image of an airplane against a sunset with printed text of a refrain from the final hymn of the funeral, "I'll Fly Away." My dad was a professional pilot for most of his working life. It seemed like the perfect way to send dad on this final, solo flight to a much better place.