How Does Your Garden Grow?

Gabriel made his stage debut as a rappin' weed in February when the school had the K class perform in a musical called "How Does Your Garden Grow?".

David & I agreed to shoot the video for the school like we did when Carmen's kindergarten class did "E-I-E-I Oops" two years ago (and she was a little lost lamb with a singing solo). We also shot a program for Spanish Immersion last year, so we get questions now and then about shooting other things for the school or individuals (which we politely decline).

We shot Carmen's performance at least 3 times and with multiple cameras and David edited them together using Final Cut Pro (which I will apparently never learn because he's already so good at it).

This time we enlisted Hidy to shoot from front, center stage. David shot from the right and I shot the peanut gallery. We also had a camera set up in the back on a tripod, and Gigi shot stills, while Jackie came to help keep an eye on Paloma, Mason & Maya (who were staying with Gigi & Hidy while Amy & Brian went to his brother's wedding in Antigua).

Anyway I didn't really get to see the performance until later, on tape, because I was busy following David's instructions. (He had attended that morning to take notes, using his TV producer/director background to our advantage.)

Most of the following weekend, including one night through 5 in the morning, he was importing tapes into the computer so he could start editing. He couldn't wait to show us some of the fun and funny things he found (and let me actually watch Gabe on stage, which I couldn't during the show).

Hours and hours and hours of editing later, he had the video ready to go. The kids watched it over and over on the computer. But when David went to make a Quicktime video to export it on to DVD, the computer froze. Three times. And when it did so, it turned itself off.

So he researched this problem, and as it turns out, our computer is not really meant to run a huge program like Final Cut Pro, and as a defense mechanism to avoid overheating, it just turns itself off.

The next time he tried to export, he stood over the computer waving a large piece of cardboard.


And, crazy but true, it worked.

After that, it still took a while to get the DVD ready to send back to the school. We got photos from another parent and David designed the cover, insert, etc.

Two weekends before spring break, we spent the better part of the weekend putting the DVDs together. The kids were a big help, which was great because we had orders for 130 DVDs and David really wanted to get them out before #1 the baby came and #2 spring break.



This is the pile we sent to school. It was a relief to have them done, even for me, so we could resume something like a normal life, and also because the DVD cases had a horrible smell!

The final product turned out really great. It's neat that David can share this talent with so many people at school, but it's really a labor of love, because we could not charge enough to make it worth the time it takes to put something like this together.