No promises!: Time flies...

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Time flies...

So here we are, at the tail end of another school year. Summer band? Check. Football season? Check. Concert season? Check. Band banquet? Check. All we lack now is graduation, and that will be next week. Granted, had you asked me November if the year was going by quickly, I'd have asked if YOU wanted to go to football games every Friday for 4 months, and then cheerfully throttled you. :)

So let's chat about the Band Banquet, shall we? I decided in September that I wanted to put all the pics I was taking of the kids at games and various competitions together into a slideshow for the Banquet. Nothing fancy with music or anything - just a constant revolution of nicely captioned pictures, in as close to sequential order as I can achieve. Simple, yes? Heh. If you agreed with that, you obviously don't know me very well.

I asked some of the parents I'd seen taking pics throughout the year if they had any they would like to contribute to the cause. I wasn't thinking that this would A) postpone the project until I had all the pics, and B) create MORE work for myself. The first thing I did? Procrastinate!! I told the lady in charge of the banquet what I was going to do, and she made arrangements for me to be able to do it. I still hadn't started.

About 2 weeks ago I realized that I ought to get started captioning all the images, and then immediately realized that I hadn't transferred my Photoshop over to my new laptop. There was no way in HELL I was going to go into each image and type "Emerald Coast Marching Classic" or "FBA Competition" or "Gator Bowl Parade" or whatever the caption was to be. I had to wait for Billy to transfer the program for me. We moved it over Monday night - 6 days before the banquet.

I started captioning the images Thursday evening. Billy recommended that I dump all the images into Windows Movie Maker (WMM from now on) and turn it into more of a movie than just a slideshow. Sure, ok. (oh, if only I had known then what I know now...) Friday I got down to business. I had all the images captioned and filed away in separate folders arranged by event, and all the events were in chronological order.

WMM is obviously one of Microsoft's more evil inventions. I don't know if Bill Gates found out that I'm doing my damnedest to find a plug in that will sync my PDA with Thunderbird so I can get rid of Outlook or what, but WMM caused me more grief and pain than anything I can recall in recent memory. I spent two days working on JUST making this movie, and I mean 5 hours at a time, and had nothing but little red patches on my cheeks and a vein throbbing on my forehead to show for it. I did get to experiment with various combinations of swear words - that part was fun - but nothing to show for it. My brand new laptop bogged down MISERABLY when I ran WMM, and it took nearly 10 minutes to load the project after every reboot that followed the program crashing.

I needed to leave between 4:30 and 5 to get there early enough to set up, and I spent 3:30 - 4:30 getting ready and still futzing with the godforsaken movie. At that point, I had an epiphany. Threatening my laptop with a swirlie is NOT going to get this movie done. I scrapped everything I had been working on the past week, and went into my nice, simple image viewing program. I clicked 'file,' 'slideshow,' 'and dumped in all the images, clicked 'save as' and POOF, I was done.

I took Billy and Cam with me to the banquet. TJ was scheduled to teach Fire Academy that day, and they were scheduled for a live burn (they set the fire tower on fire and send the youngsters in), so he was out. I thought Billy would be ideal in the event something dreadful happened with my slideshow (I mean really, the way things had gone to this point?), so off we go. We got there and hauled up my laptop, the projector, extension cords, tape, and everything we could possibly need. Then we find out that the screen we're supposed to use is like 50 feet away from where they set up the cart for the projector we brought. That's a little TOO far.

I went to set the rest of my stuff down and Billy futzed with the projector for a while, and when I returned, he was talking to some guy in a UWF shirt (we were in the Conference Center there). I don't know how they found each other, and I can make many, MANY jokes about tech nerds being able to sniff each other out of a crowd -but I won't!- but this was the guy in charge of the technical bits of the center. He asked if we wanted to hook up to the Center's large overhead, and Billy said, "Sure!" He was drooling over it from the time he came in - it's enormous, y'all. There were at least two dozen ports on the back for various inputs and outputs, and as if that wasn't enough...there was a remote for it that did everything but wipe your behind. It even had a laser pointer built in!

So I went to check in with the lady in charge, and she said to see if they were going to charge for it - she didn't sign up for that because there was a charge for it. Hmm. I moseyed over to where Billy and his new best friend were hooking everything up and said, "Um, this wasn't in the contract, so-" and he smiled and says, "Don't worry about it. It's nice to find someone that understands it and enjoys it as much as I do." Hee!!! So we got the overhead for free!

Every year the Banquet's theme is set on the theme of our halftime show. This year it was "The Rise and Fall of Rome", so we had columns everywhere, laurel wreaths on every surface, and even flags hanging from the ceiling. Very nice decor. You'll never guess what kind of salad...wait for it....wait....hee! Caesar salad! Ha!

We got set up, my boss called me from the Commons (where we had it last time) asking where everyone was, and I got him headed in the right direction. He got there and we let the kids in. The dress was "Sunday best or your best Senate toga" so we had about 2 dozen people come in togas. I set up my slideshow and we went off to eat.

Overall, it was a GREAT night. We ate, then my boss and I talked up at the podium; we passed out awards for service, and then got some gifts ourselves. We announced next year's student leaders, and then the dance started. I ran the slideshow throughout the dance so the parents would have plenty to do while the kids ran around acting like monkeys.

I got a very nice framed scrapbook page with pics of me and the kids on it, and then two of the freshmen parents made my boss and I entire scrapbooks for the year. They are amazing! That made me tear up a little. I wasn't expecting anything like that. I got a lot of compliments on the slideshow, and one parent suggested I rip it to CD or DVD and sell it for $5 as a fund raiser. I would have to get back into WMM to do that, but I think that I could start over and maybe do it in a more timely manner...it could work. :)

Labels: Band

posted by Jen @ 8:07 PM

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