Let's create a movie II

Last January after creating a movie using Windows Vista I documented it in a blog entry. This weekend before going to my wife's parents for an early Thanksgiving get together, I again created a movie but this time using my Apple MacBook. I already had digital photos that my kids took during their Princess Cruise to Scandinavia on my Mac laptop. When they got home from teh cruise, I hooked up our Canon Powershot A590 to my son's iMac and transferred all 560+ photos. I then sat down at the computer with my wife and came up with 75 of the photos she thought represented the whole trip. I burnt a CD of these photos to send to her sister. Before sending her the CD, I put it in my MacBook and created an iPhoto library for all of the cruise photos. On Saturday morning at 10 am I decided it would be nice to create a movie of these photos so we could watch them on their TV instead of huddling around my laptop to watch them. Plus they would have the DVD and could watch it whenever they wanted or to show their friends. I have never created a movie on my laptop nor used iMovie or iDVD.

The first thing I did was drag all of the cruise photos from iPhoto into iMovie. I then noticed the project had a default name so I changed it to "Princess Scandinavian Cruise 2009". I then thought it would be nice to change the way to movie looked so I went in the "Project Properties" and found six themes available with the default being a theme of "None". I tried the "Photo Album" theme which mean the project had to be rebuilt. Then I tried the "Bulletin Board" theme and waited for the project to be rebuilt before trying it. Then I tried the "Comic Book" theme and liked how that looked. By selecting this theme it automatically created nice transitions between the photo frames which I really liked. Then I thought I need to create a nice title page. I then found that I could add a dynamic map to that page. When I added the map I saw it had a default origin of San Francisco. When I double clicked on it, I found I could add my own origin and destination. I add JKF in NYC as origin since that is where they took off from. I added Copenhagen, Denmark as the destination since that was where they landed. I had a screen shot of their route while on the ship that I got from the Princess Cruise web site which I then added as the second title page. Then I saw that iMovie had automatically created a page that started with the words "Directed by Rick Evans". Now that was really nice touch. When I played the movie I saw the title page still had the default project name before I changed it. I tried changing the theme and that did not regenerate the title page as I expected. Then I thought I would try to double click on the title page and sure enough it let me change the title directly. I looked up at the clock and only 15 minutes had passed, which was also nice. Then I thought I have enough time to get a little creative with the end of the movie. I moved the "Directed by" page to the end and added a new credits page. There were so many formats that I tried a couple different ones. Then I added a nice underwater reflection behind the credits. When I played the movie the credits went way to fast, so I extended the length of the underwater reflection and then extended the credits to match. I then played the whole movie and showed it to my daughter, who approved.

I then tried the "Export" option from the menu and found iMovie creates Internet style movies for YouTube and Internet style sites. When in the "Share" menu I saw a "DVD" menu item and clicked on it. Then I waited and saw that iMovie was automatically transferring the files to iDVD, which I was not sure that I had or not. When I looked up at the clock it was 30 minutes since I started working on the movie and when it appeared in iDVD. It had even picked a nice 3D rotating animation for the initial DVD menu with my project title showing up in the menu and random photos being displayed on the rotating cylinder. Now that was simple and easy. With almost no effort I was ready to create a DVD and all I had to do was find a physical DVD to write it to. That was so easy it was embarrassing as within 40 minutes I had a very nice DVD. When we showed up during the weekend even though it was only 5 minutes long every one was happy with it.

I must say that it was very easy to create a very good looking movie with little effort.

scare me?

I just don't understand why someone would want to scare themselves on purpose. Why do kids like to be scared? I am not sure. Our two sons who are still living at home with us decided this weekend that they needed a good scare, so they drove an hour and a half to Greensboro to see Woods of Terror. One of them won free tickets somehow so at least they did not pay $25 each for such a thing. I heard three versions of the same night of terror. Our daughter talked to them when they got back so that was the first version we heard. Then I had to discuss it with our oldest son to see how he described it. Then I talked to my youngest son to hear his version. Somehow they enjoyed getting scared out of their wits. For me I think I would have died of a heart attack from the fright that they described. I really don't think it is good for me health and so I will use that excuse from now on.

While talking to my youngest son I found out why he has not been able to sleep at night the last four days. He watched a movie on the internet called Paranormal Activity. He said he watched it in bed on his laptop with headphones and has yet to be able to sleep at night. I heard him a couple of times this week running down the hall and then slamming the door to his room in the middle of the night. That certainly does not sound like a healthy affect to have on a person. Anything that makes you that fearful is definitely not a good thing. My son told me it was about demons. Also sounds like yet another reason not to see it. Now I understand why it is so scary for him. If you believe their is another spiritual world, then this is probably not the best film to see. The problem is that demons and angels both exist but neither of them should be our focus or concern. Jesus is here to protect us and keep us safe not to give us a spirit of fear. We should strive to help our fellow man not fear what we cannot see. If our fear keeps us from helping others, then I am 100% sure that is not something that GOD has sent to encourage us. I am not into calling things demonic but I would call this movie a scary distraction from what we should be doing with our lives.

Rajastan

There is something that is alluring about Rajastan. I have driven through most of that state in northern India. On the surface it is just one big dry hot desert, which is very dusty. Even after 30 years I can still remember things about it as it is so unique in all of India. I recall driving through the villages and you could easily tell when you have left one and entered another. In one village all of the men would be wearing yellow turbans, in the next they would all be wearing bring red ones and in the next they would be wearing green. The buildings everywhere matched the drab yellow brown sand with few trees in sight, but then you would see the women wearing the most bright colored saris and the men with their colored turbans. An occasional camel would be seen pulling a two wheeled cart. Every now and then you would see an amazing castle on a rocky hill that is centuries old. The hills are nothing more than huge boulders. I have spent the night with friends in the pink city of Jaipur and the blue city of Jodhpur. Driven past the Jal Mahal outside Jaipur, the Mehrangarh Fort on the hill outside of Jodhpur and the Taj Lake Palace on a lake outside Udaipur. So many fascinating and enchanting places to see, so it is no wonder that foreign tourists want to go there.



That is not want I had originally intended to write about today, but the origin of my thoughts was a movie was saw last night called Nanhe Jaisalmer. I have been watching Indian movies since we lived in Saudi in the late '80s, where the local Qatar TV station showed the weekly Thursday night Indian movie. Since the weekend was Thursday and Friday, this was the equivalent on our Saturday night, so I stayed up late watching the movie which ended around midnight. Now we rent Indian movies at a local Indian store. In all of those years and the unknown number of movies I have seen, it still amazes me at now uplifting they are and a true learning experience for me. Of course it really helps that I have lived to see many of the places in India where they shoot the films, but still the culture is so fascinating to me that I learn something new about the culture with every movie I see. I enjoyed the music in "Nanhe" and there were so many wonderful one liners. Just a great family movie with a good story and wholesome point. Who can complain about that?

family matters

We saw an Indian movie that we really liked last night called Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, which means "Sometimes happy, sometimes sad". It is about how a family interacts with each other. A son obeying his parents and when he does not, how the consequences affect everyone for many years. His father setup a marriage for him and he decided to follow his feelings of love for a "common" woman that broke up the family. Such great family values that apply half way around the world to our family. It never ceases to amaze me how such a different culture has so many applicable wonderful traits that are valuable for us as a family. I don't even have to try hard to favor Indian culture as it just comes naturally somehow to a Virginia country boy like me.

favorite Indian movies

This is the list of my wife and my favorite Indian movies that we have watched over the last couple of years. I still think watching Indian movies are the cheapest and best forms of entertainment on the planet today. We can rent these at the local Indian movie store for $1 each.

Taara Zameen Par
Vivah
Jodhaa Akbar
Bride and Prejudice
Black
Provoked
Eklavya
Guru
Bend it like Beckham
Chak ed India
Dor
Paheli
Veer Zaara
Iqbal
Lagaan
Pinjar
Hum Tumhara Hain Sanam
Swades
Dil se
Pardes
Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam
Fanaa
Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge
Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham
Nanhe Jaisalmer
Rab ne bana di Jodi

A really good set of links on Indian movies can be found here: Highest Grossing Bollwood movies

silsila vs vivah

This weekend we watched two very different Indian movies.

The first, Silsila was made in 1981 but had pretty shocking subject matter for it's time. The main character's brother had premarital sex and his girl friend became pregnant, which was revealed at his premature death. His brother had a choice to marry his brother's wife or to follow his heart's desire to marry his girl friend. He choose his duty of taking his brother's pregnant wife to cover up her pregnancy. He regretted it and finally had a long term adulterous relationship with his girl friend. Quite shocking subject matter indeed for an Indian movie even today.

The second, Vivah was a complete contrast. It is about the prefect premarital engagement process. Long drawn out and shows how traditional marriages are arranged and work themselves out. I found the movie very entertaining as for me, this is the "real" India that I saw when I lived there.

On a complete different subject, this weekend was a long 4th of July holiday and it seems like we have changed as a family all of the sudden. And I don't mean that the kids started watching Indian movies with us. The kids all went outside and we played frisbee together on Friday, which was the first day of the long weekend. That set the tone for the weekend. As I have mentioned previously, we typically only get together during vacations, but we got together several times this weekend. Eating together, playing cards together, talking together was enough to send me into a state of shock. I even took two of the kids to play tennis with me. We repeated that again today, so at the moment life is very good in our household, which I cannot always says was the case. I am going to keep it all positive and now regress in time to contrast to our current situation.

Akbar to 81

This was an interesting weekend as this time of year we celebrate the combined birthdays of my wife's father and my daughter, since their birthdays are only a couple of days apart. Before leaving for Wilmington, we started the weekend off by seeing the newest Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar. Indian movies are so fascinating to me as they always seem to have an interesting point or are pure entertainment without bad language or sexual content. This was a movie of epic proportions - I am so thankful to have a wife who enjoys going with me as that makes it even more enjoyable.

I don't know what happened on the drive down to the beach city of Wilmington as I slept almost all of the way. Happily I was not driving! Once we arrived, my daughter was treated like royalty as usual. I think that is why she wants to stay longer when it is time to return. We had a few laughs over presents and times of reminiscing of life in South Korea for the Dietrick family. Then the subject of computers came up of which I quickly become the family expert. In the morning I tried to fix my wife's father's five year old laptop.

He was complaining about how slow it was and how he had no disk space left. I first looked at his Recycle Bin and noticed it was almost 1 GB. When I looked at the contents I saw it had never been empty since 2002 when he bought it. I am still amazed at how unintuitive computers can be to someone's who career is not working with them. After running Disk Cleanup, and cleaning up the trash can, the space was still not coming back. I then found a utility called Folder Size, and it pointed me right to the problem of 6 GB of temporary files on main windows folder. Then I found out that with all of the programs installed recently the disk was badly fragmented. When I checked Windows Task Manager, I found out that 400 MB of memory was allocated but only 204 MB of memory was installed. We went out trying to find matching memory and after visiting every store we could find we had nothing to show for it. In the last store the man was so helpful that he said we could substitute other memory for the one I was looking for, but they were out. We went back to the next to last store that we had visited and found another person to help us. He located memory we needed and once back home it actually worked! In the end, he had a computer with 7 GB more free and 640 MB of memory and a laptop he could actually use! This was my birthday present for him and it was greatly appreciated by the newly crowned 81 year old patriarch of the family.

Let's create a movie

For my sister's 50^th birthday present, her boyfriend paid to have 380 photo slides, our dad took of us when we were kids, converted to photo CDs at the local CostCo in Virginia. She sent them to me by UPS so I could amuse myself, since I was not able to make it to see her last weekend. I had a wonderful thought that I should load them all on my laptop and create a single DVD movie. How hard could that be? When I had my Apple PowerBook laptop, it would have been so simple. Now I have a lowly Windows Vista laptop, which changes everything. I read once that Vista had made this easier, so I was about to find out in person.



About half of the slides were taken when my dad flipped the camera sideways. Not a problem, I thought, as it must be easy to just load then and rotate them in the default Windows Photo Gallery program that comes with Vista. Turns out you just load the first photo and page them the photos using the right arrow button and when you see one that needs to be rotated, you just click on the rotate arrow, when you click to see the next photo, the rotated one is automatically saved. This is very nice and easy as it should be. Once I had all of the images correctly oriented, I had to figure out how to make a movie.

Right at the top of same Windows Photo Gallery window, is an icon with a label next to it of "Make a Movie". How convenient. When I click on this link, I see Windows Movie Maker come up with a single photo in it. It must be easy to just add all of the images. I see a menu on the right hand side that has a section labeled "Edit" and under that section I see "Imported Media", but it is grayed out and I cannot click on it. I delete the single photo and it is still grayed out. Then I notice in the toolbar at the top is what I need the same "Import Media" and this one is clickable. Then we hit the part of Vista I like and hate all at the same time. The file explorer window comes up with the default path set to "<< Users > rick > Videos >". I go to the folder on my 2^nd hard drive with all of the folders, and then multiple-select all of the JPG files and click on the Import button at the bottom. Now I see all of my photos in the middle of the window and thumbnails are automatically generated. I actually have all of my images loaded, so it must be easy to generate a movie now.



I have finally arrived at the fun part. I have used effects and transitions in many different graphical editors, like Adobe Photoshop. Under the same Edit section that I saw previously, now I see both "Effects" and "Transitions" listed. When I click on "Effects" I see a wonderful gallery that shows me all of the effects and when I select one a window on the right hand side shows me what the affect looks like in action. Very nice, but how do I use them? I see a small strip at the bottom of the window that is labeled "Storyboard". I drag a photo down on a film strip looking area and now I see my photo in the storyboard. Turns out there is a gray star in the photo thumbnail within the storyboard where you have to drag the selected effect. With transitions there are similar gallery images and those must be dragged onto the arrow icons between photo film strip thumbnails.



I must say that the overall user experience was really nice so far as I had constant feedback on what I was doing and Windows Movie Maker allowed me explore and try things out with undo that made sense. I clicked on "Titles and credits" and found even more fun things to play with as each title has animations attached to them as well. It is amazing at how easy it is to create professional looking movie affects.



So what is the problem? I have Windows Vista Basic, so it does not allow me to create a DVD. I was able to create a video CD with a WMV file, which works great, by clicking on the "Publish Movie" link in the toolbar. It brought up a dialog with "Recordable CD" listed as one of the options. I clicked on the link at the bottom, which said "How do I publish a movie?". In the help window that came up it had another link which said "To publish and burn a movie to a DVD", which is exactly what I wanted to do. When I open the link I see the bad news:

To publish and burn a movie to a DVD, you must have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium.

I am sure there is a way but I am tired after trying all afternoon to find a way with freeware or shareware to do it. Too bad Microsoft wants to make me pay as I definitely don't feel like giving them any more money after today.

Real men can weep

My blog, which started out as a collection of web design problems and solutions as I encountered them, has turned into a discussion of Indian movies and the Hindi language. Having lived in India for two years, when I was but 20 years old, there is something that happened to me while I was there that I have not been able to remove since - I just love to be around the people of India and to learn more about the culture.

Last night was very interesting... My wife and I wanted to see a movie at the local Indian movie theater. I read the reviews in the local newspaper of the new Indian films currently showing and one of them sounded bad while other one had a certain appeal. A really good friend of mine once told me that he did not like movies that invoked your emotions as the director was manipulating you. I understand his view, but for me a movie has to stir up your emotions or make you contemplate life in order to be a good movie. There is no way I could watch so many Indian movies without this view, as I still believe the goal of an Indian movie is to make you cry, laugh, and dance, but not particularly in that order!

The movie we choose to see was Taare Zameen Par. I was really wondering what we had done as the opening credits were quite strange, but it all made perfect sense by the end of the movie. In summary, I have never ever wept as much as I did last night. I wanted to quickly leave the movie theater when the movie was over, in case I saw someone I knew and had to show them my red eyes! The movie was so emotional for me due to many reasons...

When I was in the first grade I had severe learning disabilities as I had dyslexia. My first grade teacher hated me and it was a mutual feeling. I would not sit still and I could not read, but I loved to draw - not a good combination when the whole goal of the class was to learn how to read. In the rural Virginia school I attended, they decided by the third grade whether you were in the smart class or dumb class and split you up. My mother was determined not to allow me to get into the dumb class as you basically never got out and by high school you were delegated to shop, woodworking and industrial classes. Looking back this seems so cruel and such a bad educational system. Anyway, for two years my mother tutored me and somehow using the local library as a resource learned how to help me get over my dyslexia. I actually only learned about this recently. Throughout my life, few things have come to me easily and I just overcame by working as hard as I could.

Our daughter had similar reading disabilities and had trouble reading until she got into the third grade. The schools now are much more forgiving and she was given special reading classes and taken out of her normal classroom every day for 1-2 hours of tutoring with teachers who specialized in disabilities. Now she loves to read and had the highest grade for reading in her last year of elementary. One of our boys has suffered thru his disabilities, but much later in his life. With the internet providing so much information, my wife has become an expert at helping him. I can just imagine what would become of them both 100 years ago, when ignorance on such issues ruled.

One more point... I have had many Indian friends over the last 25 years who have attended private Catholic schools in Indian as they are considered the best education you can get. Once you get to be college age, if you are the absolute best you can try to get into one of the 5 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) universities as many of my friends were able to. One of them told me there were 25,000 applications for the 1000 freshmen allowed to attend. Just imagine how privileged you are when you graduate from these universities - truly the cream of he crop. What happens to everyone else who does not make it? It reminds of of professional sports in USA. There is an excellent book that documents just how hard it is to get into pro sports called Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport.


Back to the movie, I think so many factors came into play to cause such emotions to flow. Having lived the subject of the movie and having seen my kids live it as well along with having lived in India, it all came to life in this movie. When watching the movie, I thought I had been there before. In researching it this morning I found out that I had indeed been in the same location for a month when in Mahabaleshwar, Maharastra some 25 years ago. When watching the movie I saw a sign that said New Era High School and the town of Panchgani.

It all just leaves me speechless.

Hidden secrets of every society

My wife and I saw the Indian movie Provoked this weekend. It did not shock me that there was only one other couple in the theater with us when we saw it, as I do not expect this movie to be popular. It is not your typical feel good movie, but a true life story of an abused wife who kills her husband. We get used to bad news in the west, but to even talk about a husband abusing his wife is shocking for an Indian topic. Shocking that someone would try to make a movie about such a taboo topic.

I was 19 years old when I first went to India. I knew very little about India, except that Indira Gandhi had something to do with it and that my mom always told me "eat all your food since children are starving in India". For some odd reason I thought India would be full of highly religious people. I still remember how shocked I was the first time I saw drunk men in a remote village. I had the strangest misconceptions, but what to expect at such a young age! I would not have been able to handle such a harsh topic as wife abuse.

Becoming wiser in my old age, I now understand morals have nothing to do with culture as there are good things about India and America and at the same time evils I really don't want to know about. There are so many good things about the Indian culture that I really like and appreciate the more I get to know Indians. I have to say that I am a better person because of becoming immersed in another culture other than my own.

Eklavya

The latest film my wife and I went to see was called Eklavya. We saw it at our local movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. Much of the film was shot in the Devigarh Place in Upaipur, India. If we had unlimited money, then it would be a fun place to visit for a 2nd honeymoon! I enjoy movies like this one, because they have a point instead of being pure entertainment with no thinking involved. I liked how they took a traditional story from the ancient Mahabharata and came up with a story in the present that showed the same struggles as the original story. The struggle of following traditional values in a new age at any cost is such an important topic for today. The original story on the surface does not seem to be applicable for today, but the same question remains, should I follow dharma or not?