My father's eyes (slideshow)

After completing this song and recording it over the last weekend, I began to wonder what I could do with it. My first thought was that it would make a good candidate for the Yom Kippur evening of personal songs, should it take place this year, so I set about making an edited version of the song, or as I tend to call it, the 'single' version. Eight bars of introduction were cut along with the solo section in the middle and the guitar solo at the end. Even with the edits, this version plays for 3:50 minutes, making it a long 'single'. I removed certain parts from the MIDI file as they weren't needed in this version, and in so doing, I inadvertently removed a guitar part that I later put back. Adding the vocals to this version proved easier than I expected; the vocals are the same as the 'extended' (or original) but they appear at different places in the song (because of the missing eight bars of the introduction and the missing middle).

A later thought was to create a slideshow containing photos of my father, displaying them to the background of the song. At the normal time setting of five seconds per photo, I would need 230/5=46 photos, although in the end, I set the display time to six seconds per picture (38 photos needed). Whilst I have some photos of my father stored as jpg files, these are only from the past fifteen years and I really wanted older photos. 

So I set to work going through the photo albums that we salvaged from my father's flat. At some stage, someone (probably my mother) put photos in order and even wrote either in the album or on the photos' back when and where the photo was taken. But some of the albums were complete hodge-podges with no guarantee that photos on one page would have any connection to those on the next page. At least, the "early" years were consistent; I would take a photo out of the album (the earliest, from the war years, had special 'corner fixtures' to hold the photos; whilst it was fairly easy to extract a photo, it was hard to put it back) and scan it. 

I tried to get pictures from all eras of my father's life; I couldn't find anything pre-RAF, but there were plenty of pictures from the RAF of which I scanned only representative examples. The next photos were from my parents' wedding in 1952; these were in a fancy album and could not be extracted, so I had to place the entire album on the scanner's platen and hold it down during the scan. I was pleased to find some photos from their honeymoon and one or two of my parents outside of our old house in Cardiff. I was especially pleased to find a photo of my father and grandfather from this period, and one or two of my father with a young child (I couldn't tell whether this was me).

There were only a few pictures from the '60s that I could use; most of them were group pictures that I didn't want. Similarly, there were only a few from the '70s, at least in Britain. But there were plenty of photos from the various cruises that my parents went on with much variety of backgrounds.

After scanning all the pictures that I wanted (over a few evenings), I started putting together a slideshow in the old Movie Maker program. Indecision regarding the time that each picture be displayed caused me to create the slideshow three times; the second time around, I was sufficiently alert to write down the sequence of pictures that I had chosen so that the third time would be easier. I also miscalculated the number of pictures that I included originally, so I had to add more pictures to fill out the 3:50 minutes.

After completing what I would consider to be the 'first version' of the slideshow and sending a rough copy to the childen, I prepared to go to bed. On my way, however, I realised that the slideshow was missing a few essential photos from the past few years, so I jotted the names of the people in the photos on a piece of paper then tried to sleep. Indigestion and having the song play on endless repeat in my head meant that I didn't have a good night's sleep.

This morning, I asked the family if they had any good photos of my father along with our grand-daughter, and with his carer. My wife and daughter sent me several photos, some of which were better than the ones that I had, so I removed the less good pictures and inserted the new ones. After a few iterations of this (each time I would receive a new photo), I decided that I had the final version. I converted it to mp4 format and uploaded it to YouTube, where it can be seen here.

On the left appears a honeymoon picture, showing my father in a completely different light from the man that I knew (or thought I knew). 

It occurs to me that I could provide the video for the Yom Kippur evening (should it take place) as opposed to the audio. I originally intended the slide show for those that knew my father, but those attending the YK evening might well appreciate it as well.