Dicey Splicing

This spring Tutti’s Promise will be published as a paperback and in e-book format. I love the idea of saving paper and lightening the loads in kids’ backpacks. It seems everyone has a iPad or a Nook or some sort of e-reader. Even my 88 year old father reads on a Kindle.

One advantage of the electronic version of Tutti’s Promise will be the embedded videos. My publisher has tasked me with picking clips from my mother’s Shoah Foundation testimony to pair with various scenes in the book. The wonderful thing is that the entire testimony is available through the iWitness site. iWitness is a phenomenal teaching tool that any teacher can tap into.

I discovered this week that video editing is not quite as easy as one might expect. After spending the better part of two days on my first clip, I have new-found respect for all those people that work behind the scenes in movie studios. I had to teach myself how to download, upload, splice and add transitions. The transitions are the tricky part. If you do it wrong the two pieces of film merge over each other or can contain extra moments in the final cut that you don’t want. I found the task took immense patience (a virtue I am not known to possess a lot of) and precision in mouse clicking.

Here is my first video – I should have counted how many hours it took me to create this one and a half minute video. It isn’t perfectly edited yet, but I hope you enjoy it!