Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Man Who Can't Be Moved

With the end of the year comes the final projects. In Digital Photography, it happened to be a slideshow.
The assignment was to pick a song that had a story, take pictures that match the lyrics, and make a perfectly-timed-captioned-lyrics slideshow. I chose The Man Who Can't Be Moved by The Script, one of my favorite songs. I was excited and knew it would be fun.

One almost too sunny day in Spring Break, Kayla and Paul came over to be my models. They were both so cooperative and a huge help. I can't thank then enough. Both did pretty much whatever I wanted them to, and were actually pretty darn good at it.

We took pictures, re-took pictures, and I marked off my storyboard along the way. Soon we were finished and I excitedly took my lovely collection of pictures to school to build my slideshow.

The requirement was to bring ten pictures a day and to pass you only needed 30. I had all 50 of my pictures in the first day. I edited them to perfection, and put them in the slideshow in the order they went in. Other students put them in in a random order and their timings ending up way off. Others had several gramatical errors a page or poorly edited pictures. Thanks to my OCD, I was feeling on top of the world.

One week before the slideshows were due, I was completely finished. Every class period afterwards I tweeked and cleaned my slideshow when I wasn't messing around with random pictures in photoshop. Finally, the day came. The day before they were due that you were supposed to save the slideshows in a video file to put on your hard drive.

"Who's done with their slideshow?" Mr Busby called out. Of an entire class, me and three other people raised our hands. He gave us instruction and I confidently clicked every button he told us to click. The loading bar appeared. "Now, this is going to take a while," Mr Busby warned. Oh, it took more than a while. We waited the rest of class. The lunch bell rang and everyone sprinted out of the classroom except us four girls, sitting and wiggling our mouses to keep the screensaver from interrupting the process. We talked a bit, but none of them were really my close friends. Mr Busby got bored and left us on our own in the dreary room.

Ten minutes into lunch, they were done. We all cheered as ours finished, one by one. Feeling accomplished, I decided to double check my video to make sure it worked. I clicked and my eyes sparkled at the opening slide, white letters bodly announcing my project. As the show continued, I realized the bottom of my video had somehow been chopped off, the second line of my lyrics now gone. I wanted to scream in rage. It's ruined. I have to fix all of those slides. It has to be perfect, I stared at the screen, eyebrows furrowed.

The other girls began to file out of the room, leaving me alone. And I felt really alone. I closed my slideshow, turned off my computer and slouched out of the room, very discouraged. My friends found me but I had nearly nothing to say. My mouth felt dry.

The next day I stayed after school to fix my precious slideshow. My friends sat around me, entertaining me, "oohing" and "ahhing" at my silly slides, and teasing me about my intense need for perfection. When it was all fixed and the video was finally finished saving, We watched it. Every word was seen and every picture centered. Just like I wanted it. I beamed as I left the school and went home, plenty satisfied with that determined man. After all, they say he can't be moved.

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