Data Collection Center THE MOVIE

The first time I came up with the idea of creating a sort of self-promoting video for the extraterrestrial Data Collection Center I was filled with lots of ideas. However, when I begun on it's creation I kept getting writer's block and my ideas did not come to me like they did before. This is the story, although rather brief, of how I went from ideas to the final product amid all the drama.

I had no idea where to begin with it. I looked blankly at my computer for days on end. I opened up a PowerPoint Presentation and mucked around with images, animation and slide transitions. I'd never done a PPT Presentation before, not of this sort of thing. I began to get the hang of working the PPT to my advantage but quickly became unstuck the moment I tried to add a music track. In short, my daughter helped me after I discovered you needed .wav audio files. Days later my PPT Presentation was finished. Hooray!

After much editing I finally decided to somehow add it to the web. Everything I tried ended in failure. I came to the realization that the PPT file would not upload as it was the wrong type of file - no matter where I tried to add it. So I set about finding PPT to other type of file converters. Of the 7 converters I downloaded, opened and began converting the PPT file only two actually began to convert the file. One succeeded completely in converting the file but then I couldn't use the new converted file as it only converted one slide and not the other 31. AVS would not even install on my computer. I must have pulled out a quarter of my hair that week trying to find a converter that actually worked.

I finally took a deep sigh and realized this method was not working. So, with my Windows movie maker I began to re-create the entire PPT Presentation, losing the animation and colour text choices I'd previously created. I was so heart-broken by this means of getting one video onto the Internet.

Finally I got the movie created and although the PPT Presentation looks better I had to be happy with this new version. I decided to upload it to my Picassa web albums but a huge wall came up. The file would not upload to Picassa web. I tried adding it to Facebook but that didn't work either. Tried adding it to Blogger and that didn't work either. By this time I was losing all hope of getting this video on the Internet.

I tried adding it to Youtube but even though, at this point, I didn't have a Youtube account, someone had linked their Youtube account to my Google account. this made it impossible for me to create a Youtube account, period. I disabled the linked Youtube account from my Google account but it still did not solve the problem.

Finally I decided to create another Google account and that worked. I went ahead and began to upload my video file to Youtube but then the uploading process just froze on me. Two and three quarter hours later, still waiting for the upload to finish, I gave up and cancelled the upload. I felt so miserable about it all, that I thought this video at the top of my blog was never meant to be on the Internet for everyone to see.

Of course, after I logged off of Youtube and got back on afterward my video showed up as a saved and uploaded file. I was stoked. That made my day. Since then I have put my video on a few other website profiles.

Here's the end result below.