Sunday, February 22, 2009

Nanci turns 60 — The Magik of Multimedia

 
A couple of months ago my niece Amber asked me to handle the multimedia part of a celebration that she & Karina were organizing for her Mom — my "big" sister Nanci Gail Pammett Phelan — to honor her on her 60th birthday. So naturally I took on the project with much enthusiasm because I knew it would mean a great deal to my sister plus it'd be a great way to hone my multimedia skills, not to mention the nostalgia of going back thru family photos for the last 6 decades.

Click here for the full size image of 'The twenty-one Faces of Nanci', a DigitalMediaMagik.com collage I created to honor Nanci on her 60th birthday As planned, the surprise party for Nanci took place on Saturday February 21st in Elmira, Ontario, Canada. She was completely surprised as you can tell from the YouTube video that I captured when Nanci first arrived at the party. The picture on the right is what I called "60 Years of Nanci". I had the collage printed professionally, framed, and then this is what I wrapped up for Nanci to open at the party. Later on I made this version for her because the blue-sky background lets the faces show up better + this background picture was taken on our trip to Canada for our brother, Johnny's, memorial service. I chose the sunset picture because it is from Pigeon Lake on the day of our Dad's funeral.

The full set of pictures are in this Flickr album — and man was it hard to sort thru them all to come up with a subset to use in the video that I played during the celebration. If I do say so myself… this was multimedia at its best: people were moved to tears reminiscing thru Nanci's life — childhood, adolescence, her University years, marriage, bringing up her children, the passing of our parents, birth of grand children… — all with a sound track that brought back memories and culminated in an animation creatively made from the "Faces" collage shown above. Due to size limitations imposed by (the free) YouTube, only a "speeded up" version of Nanci's Video on YouTube can be seen in a web-based presentation. But if you do want to download the full video to your hard drive right-click here and do "Save Target As". Be forewarned that it's 378 MB so that might take a while. Using my cable modem the download took 9 minutes. The full 12-minute video, like all multimedia products from DigitalMediaMagik.com, plays on a Mac with QuickTime and on Windows with Window Media Player.

So… Happy Birthday, Nanci !!     It was totally my joy to be a part of your well-deserved celebration.
 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Nanci!

Anonymous said...

Kevin. You ROCK, Brother!!!!

How wonderful that you used Your passion to show how passionately you love your sis.

Well Done, Indeed!!!!

NANCI PHELAN said...

Thanks so much Kevin for all the work you did and for making the long drive up to visit me. I'm glad you were able to hone your video making skills in the process. I'm so glad you're my little brother. Your day will come!!! love Nanci