The Pirate Birthday Video

I made this little pirate birthday video for the birthday of Wendy, the diva party girl, a fellow SBI-er and POTC (Pirates of the Caribbean) fan. It combines some familiar faces with a little animation a la Photoshop (actually, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop's much less expensive cousin).

The song combines original words with an existing folk tune. It's what our family usually sings at birthday celebrations, pirate or not.

For the video, I "borrowed" some material from a POTC movie poster and modified it to get the elements I wanted in the frame. Then I copied everyone's lower jaw and made 2 extra versions of each (open big and open little) by stretching and warping. I also used a video clip of a campfire (also used in the Scary Pumpkin video) to spice up the skull at the bottom.

The song was recorded and mixed with Audacity, free music software, using a Sony Camcorder microphone plugged into my Dell laptop. The lead vocals are by my son Jared (over-dubbed for effect), and the backup singers are my daughter Anna and me.

It was all put together using Sony Vegas Movie Studio. Animation hack job that it is, it was still kind of tricky getting the mouths and the words to match up. (Is this word an "open big" word or an "open little" word?) Disney has nothing to fear, but it was a fun little project.