AGO Exhibition: I Am Here

It’s a song

Nothing’s wrong

Everything is clear

I am here.

(I Am Here by David Wall)*

I'm happy I learned that the exhibition I Am Here: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces was at the AGO, less than a week before it was leaving. I missed the original (and subsequent) announcements.

This exhibition speaks so much to my love of memories and documenting our lives. This is how the AGO presented the exhibition:

The exhibition was divided by theme. I took a photo of each title sign and put them in this collage.
The themes included Our House, We Are Family, Food Glorious Food, Fight The Power, Dance To The Music, My Favourite Things, On The Street Where You Live, Life Is A Highway, Everyday People, and Panorama.

In the middle of the Home and Family areas, was a collection of lost albums that really had me thinking about how photo albums have changed over the years. For almost a century, people have told their life stories with photo albums. How will the next generation tell their life stories?

The exhibition included many home movies including "baby's breakfast" which may be the first home movie ever recorded by Louis Lumière in 1895. This reminded me of seeing another Louis Lumière film of workers leaving a factory at a previous exhibition. 

I Am Here also showed how home movies have changed since its inception with a special focus on protests captured on our smart phones in the past decade. This part of the exhibition was very insightful and thought-provoking.

I was inspired by the "Mixtape Diaries" by Glynnis Grant-Henderson. I create yearly playlists of the songs I love each year. I have often blogged about them, but I loved the journals that Glynnis created. My husband has made over 200 mixtapes (back in the cassette days). It would be amazing to have some thoughts to transport us back to what he was thinking when he made them.

Another exhibit that had me thinking was one of Andy Warhol's 600 memory boxes. It contained 595 objects that the gallery described as falling into the category of the everyday like Christmas cards, newspaper clippings, doodles and tax forms. As fascinating as it was to see a glimpse of an art icon; it's a reminder to me that as much as I love memories and memorabilia; less is more meaningful and I prefer curating my memories.

I love connected moments, so I especially appreciated this graphic showing the timeline from cave paintings to Tik Tok.

The exhibition ended with a collection of vignettes representing themes of "home-movieness". The 26 themes were titled alphabetically and included a song, I Am Here by David Wall that really resonated with me. You can see a few examples of the themes and here I Am Here in this video posted by the AGO. You can also read more about the Panorama compilation by clicking here.

I saw this exhibition at the perfect time, as I am focusing on Revive From Archive and organizing memories like art galleries curate exhibitions.

*Lyrics as I hear them. Apologies if there's a mistake

Scenic Route Part Two

Don't worry about a thing

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright

Singin' don't worry about a thing

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright

(Three Little Birds by Bob Marley)

I finished the second part of my Scenic Route video. If you haven't seen the first part, you can watch it by clicking here.  My original blog post from 2018 can be found here.

I created the first part using iMovie which is pretty easy to learn but it has its limitations. I used Final Cut Pro to make the second part. I have to admit that it took me a lot longer to do it but I will want to continue to use Final Cut Pro.

I will have to learn how to use it better however. When I started to create my next video, I actually started it in iMovie figuring I could just make it quicker. It was a simpler video so I figured I didn't need the extra features in Final Cut Pro. I'm in the process of making a how-to video where I show how I make a highlight video from a few clips. It's not that difficult to do if you're interested in enjoying your videos more.

The first part of the Scenic Route video included a lot of written passages. I was thinking at the time to have the video read more like a book that included video and audio clips but the second part doesn't include as many written passages.  When I recorded the story, it just seemed more interesting to me to hear the story told than to read it. I was surprised how much emotion came up when I told the story to a camera.

After showing the first part I made with my iPhone to my husband, he told me that the video quality would be much better with his Fuji XT-4 camera and external microphone. We now have them set up on a tripod ready to video whenever we want. Even my untrained eye and ear can tell the difference in quality between the two recordings.

Unfortunately, the heater in my study was on while I recorded the video for part 2. I was bummed because I didn't think I could re-record the video with as much genuine emotion. I told the story on the recording for the first time in a while, so it was fresh and I felt what I was saying. I'm not an actor so I didn't think I could recreate it as well if I re-recorded it.

My husband showed me how to get rid of the humming using Final Cut Pro. I really need to learn how to use it better because it's amazing!! iMovie have noise reduction but it's not as precise as Final Cut Pro. The sound isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than it originally was. Someone more experienced could also have improved it more but I'm happy with the lack of experience I have.

Here is Scenic Route Part Two. Hope you enjoy it. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to see more videos and/or subscribe to my blog to read more posts. (click on the icon below my photo on the right column)

Reviving Home Video (and Audio)

For our 20th wedding anniversary, almost a decade ago, I wanted to preserve our memories so rather than regular gifts or a trip to celebrate, we purchased an iMac to optimize our photo editing and organization with Photoshop and purchased Elgato Video Capture to transfer our home videos.

This post is about Video Capture. We purchased the Elgato one, but there are other brands available that do the same thing. Video Capture allows you to connect a camcorder, VCR, DVD player or other analog video or audio sources to your computer.

You can preserve your home videos by connecting your camcorder to your computer. You press play on the camcorder and capture the video on your computer. With the video digitized, you can also edit it to save the best parts in a shorter highlights video.

Tip: If your camcorder or analog video source has an S video output, it will give better quality result than the yellow video output. The red and white outputs are for audio.

I would advise to still keep the original cassettes (and cameras) in case technology changes and improves in the next decade(s). Perhaps in the future, there will be technology to improve the quality of old film. Looking back, our home videos were first transferred to videocassettes that were of okay quality. To get better quality, we then transferred them to DVD. We can now transfer them digitally. How long will we have DVD players for? Who knows what future technology will be available?

We used to save VCR cassettes of shows we recorded or VHS movies we purchased. We can't imagine watching those anymore. Many of those films or television shows can be streamed or purchased at higher quality now. We're happy we can digitize from our original camera cassettes and not the VCR tapes or DVDs we made that may be lower quality than the originals.

In some cases, lower quality is better than nothing so there are times that I digitized a VHS tape or DVD with Video Capture. Before donating your VCR or allowing it to break, it's a good idea to transfer them if you want to do it yourself.

There are companies who provide this service if you don't want to take the time to do it yourself.

Although my home videos were digitized years ago, I recently took my Video Capture out to record songs I wrote. 

My digital piano has audio outputs so I connected it with Video Capture to my computer. It's a bit of a cheat because there's no video output. The file I get is a greyed out video with the piano audio. I edited the file in iMovie to remove the video and only keep the audio. I can then upload the audio MP3 to my music collection to listen to them.