Reification of My Digital Document

I don't even know where to begin when talking about the process of making my digital document. I guess I would say that it all started when we did our very first blog. I blogged about recently learning how to ski and wanting to learn how to ski off of some sort of jump. The next time I went skiing I had my boyfriend take a bunch of random pictures and videos of me skiing. After that, every time I went skiing I had people taking pictures of me, the scenery, and my little brother. After I had a lot of pictures I started thinking about what I was going to talk about. I had a general idea that I wanted to talk about how I am one of the only people my age who still skis and that when I first started it was horrible. After a small amount of brainstorming, I just wanted to start putting my project together. I wanted to put the pictures in order and then worry about what I was going to say when I was done. I quickly realized that was a bad idea. So I wrote my narration. After writing my narration, putting the pictures together on the slide show was so much easier. I did then realize that I didn't have a lot of pictures that I wanted. I decided to incorporate my family. So I needed pictures of me skiing when I was really little and I needed some pictures of my family. I called my mom and she searched our whole house and finally was able to dig up some old ski pictures. The following day she took them to a place to have them put on a disk so she could e-mail them (remember these pictures are from back in the day of no digital cameras so they were not on any computer). I didn't have a couple of pictures that were not really crucial but that I really wanted so I photoshopped some pictures. I had never used photoshop before so that took hours and hours of time that I was not expecting. Then I finally had all of the pictures that I wanted/needed for my project.
So I had written my narration and had all my my pictures. That is hen I THOUGHT that I was almost done. Little did I know that was just the beginning. That took the least amount of time. I put all of the pictures in the order I wanted them in. I did my project on my computer using windows movie maker. I did my narration and music using garageband on a mac. I had to learn how to use gargaeband first. Then I started to do my recording. I liked garageband because if you had said a lot and then messed up a little bit you could just cut out the part where you messed up and not the whole thing. That took me about an hour or so because I messed up a lot. Then, I looked through my music on itunes and came up with like ten songs that would fit different parts of my project perfectly. I realized if I did that, I would constantly be switching songs and that wouldn't sound very good. So I narrowed it down and choose 2 songs. I put in the music with my narration and figured out where in my narration I wanted the music to fade in and out. All of this was extremely time consuming, but by far the most time consuming part of my project was getting the timing of my words and pictures down. I sat with the mac computer and my computer next to each other and would push play on both at the exact same time to do the timing. Then I would stop them both and edit it and then start again from the beginning and then stop again to edit it and so on. I probably sat at those tow computers for about 5 hours until I decided I needed a brake. Then I went back and finished. I can't even explain how long that took. I heard the beginning to the song Mudfootball by Jack Johnson so many times that everyone in my house was ready to kill me.
Once I got my timing down, I saved the garageband file to an MP3 file and e-mailed it to myself. I then dragged it right onto windows movie maker. That actually went much smoother than I had envisioned.
I did not specifically incorporate Gee into my text because my audience is my family and friends. I talked about learned how to ski in a snowboarders world. I did not fit into the snowboarder affinity group and I had my own identity. Then, I brought into my document my family full of skiers when I am back in my affinity group. Gee also talks about once you start feeling confident in something to almost move up a step. He talks about trying something a little bit more difficult and stepping out of your comfort zone. That is how I felt when I had just gotten skiing down and then I was going to attempt going off a box.
There is one picture in my document that I feel may need some explaining. Right before I go off the box I show me skiing down to the box. I talk about how everyone I was with was yelling at me and telling my what to do the whole time I was skiing. Then, I showed a picture of the people I was with to enforce the fact that they talking at that point.
All in all, this was a long, long process but I really enjoyed making it. I realized that I could do a lot more things with computers than I thought that I could. It was extremely time consuming but I had fun making it!