Sun, Dec 08, 2002 page12

• Holiday cards set in digital motion

  Making use of CD burners, digital cameras, camcorders and home computers, more people are sending electronically made gifts to their relatives

  • By John Markoff / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The holiday movie season is approaching, and Keith Whitmer's production studio is shifting into high gear. Whitmer sits for hours in a room in Manhattan viewing scenes accumulated from a year of shooting, then more hours putting a movie together.

  Whitmer is not an independent filmmaker. He is burning video CDs in his apartment to send as Christmas gifts to far-flung relatives -- his parents and sister in California and his brother in Atlanta.

  

  And with this month's arrival, Whitmer and his wife, Jayne, are in production overdrive. Keith Whitmer tackles the video side of things, while Jayne Whitmer takes on the stills. More often than not, the production centers on their 3-year-old daughter, Olivia.

  The Whitmers are part of a growing contingent of audiovisual hobbyists for whom the holidays simply are not the holidays unless the memories of the year have been fully digitized and the holidays themselves have been shot and reshot, edited and re-edited, viewed and reviewed, posted to a Web site or sent out as e-mail or CD-ROMs or even DVDs to relatives and friends.

  The Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group, estimates that nearly 9 million digital cameras will be sold this year in the US, a 62 percent increase over last year. The group predicts that some 2.3 million digital camcorders will be sold this year, a 35 percent rise from last year.

  Not everyone will use those gadgets to provide the raw material for a digital production to mark the holidays or other events. But those who do will often put a tremendous amount of work into their projects. They will sometimes spend weeks viewing, sifting, editing, and choosing and adding music and other effects. Yet many amateur film producers welcome the distraction from other demands.

  And it's nothing like it used to be. As a teenager, Whitmer made movies with 8mm film. "It was quite a long process," he said. "The equipment was very bulky -- splicing, taping, winding, setting up the projector and the screen." Whitmer even recorded music on a portable cassette player and tried to synchronize the recording to the film.

  "It took forever to get the timing right," he said. "Now I do all of this on the Mac and burn a CD, and let everyone else use their computer as projector and screen."

  It isn't usually until after he has finished that Whitmer, 45, who owns a small advertising firm in Manhattan with his wife, notices the amount of time he spent. "It goes by quickly because you're so focused on it," he said.

  Besides, Whitmer said, it hardly feels like work. "It's more a labor of love, because you have the people in mind that you're making it for," he said.

  Whitmer's theme for last Christmas was the Terrible Twos. The film was about five minutes long, "an eternity when you are talking about a video on a computer screen," he said. The five minutes were culled from about four hours of tape.

  For the sequel this year, Whitmer is still in the concept stage, but he is considering using David Bowie's song Changes to produce a short piece about how much Olivia has changed in a year and how much life has changed as a response to her needs.

  Jayne Whitmer, 42, provides the analog reinforcement, shooting stills with her film camera. Once the holidays approach, she goes from one roll a week to two. She scans the pictures, crops them, prints them out and makes photo albums to send as gifts.

  The time spent on holiday productions is certainly impressive. "People can't possibly know how much work goes into it," Whitmer said. "It's like sending a hand-knitted sweater."

  And just as one gift sweater can give the knitter quite a reputation among family and friends, so too can one digital production cause expectations to rise. That's what happened to Ed Seidel, an associate curator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California, who now finds himself in something of an expectation rut.

  Ever since he made a digital slide show for his uncle's 60th birthday, he is expected to do the same for other major birthdays -- his grandmother's 90th, his brother's 35th.

  Seidel, 36, also makes frequent short videos and posts them on the family's Web site. During the holidays, the site receives particularly close attention, especially if Seidel and his wife cannot be with family members on the East Coast. In that case, he updates the site almost daily for several days.

  Two years ago, when he was unable to be with his family in Maine for Christmas, he created a video postcard from California of his family sending greetings and posted it on a Web site. "The whole Maine family, all 25 of them, sat around the computer and watched it over and over," he said.

  Seidel knows that producing digital movies and maintaining the family Web site can be time-consuming, so he has learned to save time by using his digital camera, which is limited to 30-second video segments. "It's already compressed," he said, "which makes it easy to put it up on the Web and share with people."

  Unlike Whitmer, Seidel didn't catch the videography bug until he bought an Apple iMac computer in 1999 and saw that the tools made the job enticingly easy -- time-consuming but enjoyable.

  Seidel has found himself cast in the role of digital producer for his entire extended family, which often provides him with raw material, like old photos and slides, which he then digitizes and posts to the Web site. "They don't know how to scan, but they do know how to go through old drawers," he said.

  In addition to the videos, Seidel usually makes holiday cards using Photoshop and other programs, then sends them out by postal mail.

  Charlie Couch also sees his holidays through the lens of his digital camera. Couch, a 39-year-old sales manager at AT&T Wireless in San Francisco, has always enjoyed taking pictures, but when he started using a digital camera nearly three years ago, he became a devotee. With the holidays approaching, he is seldom without the camera.

  For Couch, the holiday photography season starts around Halloween and reaches a height at Christmas, which he refers to as the Super Bowl of his photo year. By his calculation, he already has tens of thousands of digital images stored in his computer, many of them centered on holidays.

  Couch said the technology had changed his habits considerably. He has just begun shooting pictures from a wireless phone and sending them by e-mail. "There is something about capturing an image and being able to tell a story with a fixed image," he said.

  This year, for the first time, Couch and his wife are e-mailing digital Christmas cards, featuring a shot of their two children.

  Couch waxes particularly sentimental when talking about the moments he captures electronically. "In today's economy and today's times you can lose touch with the important things in life," he said, "and this brings me back to that."

  This holiday season is an especially poignant one for Sharon Emerson, a 33-year-old studio director for a small company in Chicago that makes games for the Web.

  She is currently hard at work making a CD for relatives -- her first such gift -- which will largely be a memorial to her Latvian grandmother, who died last year. For the CD, which is structured as a large family tree, Emerson has gathered old 8mm film that includes movies of her father's prom in 1958 and her parents' wedding in 1963, and a video tour that Emerson's grandmother gave of her apartment before she died. "I especially loved her pink bathroom," Emerson said.

  Emerson's project began as a Web site, but when the videos began to stack up, she switched media. The CD will also include Emerson's grandmother's favorite recipes and digital reproductions of old letters, many of them written half in Yiddish, half in Russian.

  Like others, Emerson finds that the technology has changed her ideas about what constitutes the perfect gift. "Ten years ago, I just would have distributed cool photos I dug up of my family, or created elaborate frames for pictures," she said. "Now, with a CD burner, I can wrap everything up in a nice package."

  It was the relative ease with which the old videotape can be transferred to a CD that motivated her. "I've been sitting on those 8mm films for years," she said. "So technology has absolutely allowed me to create this gift for my family."

  Emerson plans to send the CD out to five family members. "I don't want just a map of names," Emerson said. "I want something where generations beyond me can get a feel for who these people are."

  Even the most fanatic of holiday filmmakers recognize that there are limits. The Whitmers are on a campaign to reduce the stress in their lives, which means that Keith Whitmer might not finish the movie in time to send it as a Christmas gift. In that case, he said, refusing to fret, he will make the best of it: he will end the movie with holiday scenes and send it out in time for Groundhog Day.
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