Home Movie of Kenzie Figure Skating

In mid-August, we went to another one of Kenzie's figure skating lessons and practice sessions.  I really enjoy going to these sessions because, when the rink is empty such as it is during these sessions, I have access to the ice from one of the team benches rather than from behind hockey-puck-marred glass in the stands.  When I'm on one of the team benches, I have no marred glass in my way...  no safety nets in my way...  I can even open the door in the boards to get down low to the ice rather than shooting down on Kenzie.  Shooting photos at ice events is far more difficult because of all of these aforementioned obstacles when needing to sit in the stands.  

I always shoot a lot of photos during these practice sessions so, as usual, I came home from this practice session with far more photos than I need.  I sometimes shoot video during these sessions and I did on this day too but, for some reason (really multiple reasons), I'm never really happy with the video files.  

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I was in the folder containing all of these figure skating photos and scrolling through them the other night.  I noticed that if I scroll quickly, it is just like creating an animation by stringing together individual "frames"...  or like drawing a small figure in the corner of pages of a notebook and then quickly flipping through the pages...  the small figure is then put into motion as you flip from page to page.  I decided to do the same digitally with these still images in the hope that it would create a sort of "home movie" look.

I added all these photos into the video timeline of my video editing software.  Now I had a 12K video at this full image resolution.  The big downside to this is that this is now such a large video format that it made editing tedious and slow but the resulting video looked very much like a typical home movie from my childhood (yes, admittedly, I'm old).  By today's digital video standards, I suppose that for the average person seeing and enjoying this old film movie format and its associated quirks would be an acquired taste.

I come from a family that was big on shooting photos as well as 8mm and Super 8mm movie film at just about every family event and vacation so I happen to like the little bit of flicker, jitter and artifacts from frame to frame for family movies.  

For this video today, I added some scratches and artifacts that were typical in old films and converted the video to black and white to avoid having to color balance each frame with the following frame.  The low frames per second framerate created by stringing large still images together helped to replicate the low framerate of those old 8mm movie cameras and projectors.  In the end, while rendering the video, I converted the 12K video down to a manageable 4K format as well as rendering it in Full HD format.  I uploaded the Full HD version to my Vimeo account (seen below).

Kenzie's skating improved significantly between the end of last season and this short summer session.  I believe the primary reason for this significant jump in ability is due to getting new skates.  Another reason for this significant improvement is likely due to the fact that she simply might be at that age where she has enough strength in her legs to allow for a big jump in ability.  Anyway, Kenzie is fun to watch and it is nice seeing her skills advance from lesson to lesson.  

I don't think I'll be doing this type of "home movie" type of video often because it is tedious and time consuming but I know I do need to get back into regularly recording videos of the grandchildren.  I've been slacking off on the video side of things.  I'm still consistently shooting still photos but I have been a bit too lax when it comes to video in recent years.  I'm going to attempt to shoot more video footage in the future though (well...  we'll see how that goes!).

So, here is the video of Kenzie in a sort of "8mm home movie" style...