I'm on a roll! I just finished and submitted my video for the FlowBot Award. The winner would get admission to this year's InFlow Festival, and seeing as how I likely can't afford to go, I figured this was my only shot at getting there. Otherwise there is always next year.
Having to create these submissions has been very hard for me. First of all, just like I was when I was actually in school, I am a procrastinator. I spent the better part of the month thinking about how I wanted to create my video, but not actually doing anything about it. I had no idea how to even make a video short of the little ones I take on my camera or phone. Finally last week I googled free video making software and only then did I realize that I had Windows Live Movie Maker on my computer all along. Duh!
Then came the task of trying to teach myself rather quickly how to use the software, and following that putting the video together. I finally decided to go with using some of my favourite clips of myself hooping over the past year to show the progress I have made. This was really fun for me, to go through and watch all my videos, but also really time consuming as I have a lot of them. It was also really hard narrowing down the moments I wanted to add to the video, since it was only supposed to be 3 minutes or less.
I chose some clips from about a dozen videos or so, and picked a song for my video. Dance Dance Dance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It seemed fitting. I figured out how to add all sorts of cool little tricks and animations to my video to make the transitions between scenes look smooth. And to avoid having to film myself answering the question we needed to answer in our submission, I figured out how to add text at the beginning and end of my video. Voila!
So the question was, what was the most unexpected thing since discovering the hoop. I wouldn't say this was a hard question for me to answer, as there have been many surprises for me since I started hooping, but it was hard to say what I wanted to say in just a few words. Being long winded by nature, I would have loved to have written a short novel about hooping (sort of like I ended up doing for my Hooplove Coaching submission), but that just wasn't going to happen.
Whenever my brain started to hurt from thinking about my video too much, I just kept telling myself: Keep it simple. Less is more. So even though I wanted to say so much, I tried to keep it minimal and let the whole video speak for itself.
In the end I was really happy with how it turned out, not just for the submission, but for myself. It made me feel really good seeing the progress I had made, laid out in 3 minutes. To watch it from the start, and see how basic my skills were when I shot that first video, to how far they have come, was a wonderful feeling.
I'm not sure how much of a chance I have of winning. I have visions of all these other entries where people are pulling out all sorts of crazy tricks. The truth is, I still can't do very many tricks. I've been spending a lot more time working on my dancing and flow, than learning tricks. But you know what? I'm ok with that. I'm ok with being a hooper who maybe doesn't rock out the insane moves, but rather (hopefully!) looks good with some simple flow. One thing I realized when watching my videos, is that I am enjoying the moments inside my hoop. And that should be all that really matters.
(Note: I would share my video, but I can't figure out how! Blogger keeps telling me there's errors while uploading, Facebook won't let me due to something about copyrighted material which I'm assuming is the RHCP song, and I can't for the life of me figure out YouTube. If I figure out how to share it, I will!)
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