I Spy With My Little Eye: Photo Essay by Ruthie Zug

I was gaining a pretty good momentum in the video department until about six months ago when Bryan switched me over from a PC to a Mac. I love my Mac – especially the part about it not randomly shutting down or taking 20 minutes to power up – but you know how it is learning new stuff. Who has the time?

I have been particularly frustrated with the movie making feature on the Mac, which I suspect is way better in theory than Windows Movie Maker… if I could just figure the damn thing out. In WMM, there was a sidebar within each video project that listed the entire process in steps for making a video, including a step that said CLICK HERE TO PUBLISH YOUR VIDEO ON THE WEB.

That’s a paraphrase, but it was something just as obvious.

iMovie has all the cool features I’m familiar with, but when it came to saving it to publish on my blog, it left too much for me to figure out. I don’t want to have to figure something out – I just want it to be obvious. I have peanut butter sandwiches that need to be made RIGHT NOW, and I don’t have time to read the ‘help’ documentation.

So this is largely why it’s been since January that I made my last video. Not that I haven’t wanted to, or that I haven’t compiled hours of footage in a To Be Published folder – but it seems whenever I sit down to troubleshoot iMovie I usually end up throwing something or screaming at my husband all the way down the stairs, which is precisely the kind of behavior I’m trying to avoid.

So here is a short video to get me started and to satisfy my need to create one without drama. I was mildly successful. The beginning and end titling is too small and moves too quickly to be able to read it, but I couldn’t figure out how to edit those clips – whenever I made changes, an entire new clip was added instead of just changing the one I thought I was editing. And there didn’t seem to be a way to stretch out the length of the titling so you actually have time to read it.

I finally gave up fiddling with it, and just decided to publish it in its imperfect, Shitty First Draft state.

For the record, the opening title reads ‘Take Another Picture, Photos by Ruthie,’ and the end title references the music: ‘Music by Bishop Allen, www.bishopallen.com.’ You should really buy this album. It’s brand new, and I love it. The song I used is called Click, Click, Click, Click off The Broken String album.

This particular video is a project I’ve been wanting to do for awhile, because I love looking at the things I see every day through Ruthie’s eyes. She loves the camera, and I love encouraging her use of it. She has a respect for it, and treats it gently and always tightens the strap around her wrist. Many grown-ups worry and fret when they see her handling such a sophisticated piece of equipment, but it’s actually one of the few things I can fully trust her with.

And I need a little more of that between us.