As my first real attempt at video creation/editing, I made a video tribute to Steve Whitmire:

Special thanks and apologies to my fellow Muppet Pundit commenters Matt L., Richard X., and Rocky D., whose photos/artwork were among those that I co-opted for use in this video.

This came about because I found a similar tribute on YouTube, and I liked the pictures but I didn’t like the choice of song.

I found Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” to be much more applicable to Steve and his story, so I started watching the tribute video but muting the audio and listening to “7 Years” over top of it, which worked well as they were about the same length.

Then I thought, “This is nice, but wouldn’t it be better if the pictures kind of matched up to the lyrics and/or illustrated the trajectory of Steve’s career in at least a roughly chronological pattern?”  And then I started thinking about how I could do that and what pictures I would use, and how I could combine images and music to convey the story.

After a while, I could hardly stop thinking about it, so I opened up Windows Movie Maker, got on the Muppet Wiki and started looking for pictures…and, a couple months later, this is the end result.

I’m better at expressing myself in words, not in visual images, so this was difficult for me; sort of like learning a new, visual vocabulary.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed setting myself a new creative challenge in doing something that I hadn’t done before.  I appreciate the opportunity to show the world in more than mere words what Steve and his work mean to me, and to demonstrate to Steve how he continues to inspire creativity, as this definitely qualifies as something creative that I did because I couldn’t not do it.