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 60^th 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.

As planned, the surprise party for Nanci took place on Saturday February 21^st 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.