Shelly, the SBI Tortoise

"Shelly, the SBI Tortoise" was another video that centered around SBI (along with I Love My SBI, The Secret Lives of Ken Evoy and The Tortoise video). Like the Ken Evoy video, there was no contest involved -- just a desire to have fun and give a little back.

SBI (the company) decided to make little pewter statuettes of its mascot, the tortoise, and send them to a select group of people who had made a significant contribution to SBI. I was surprised and honored to be a part of that group, which I found out about when a little box showed up in the mail with "Shelly".

I found out many others had received this unexpected gift, and they started posting pictures of her on SBI forums. I decided it would be fun to do a video compilation of as many of the pictures as I could get -- so, I wrote a song and put together this video.

Producing the SBI Tortoise Song

I wrote the song, which was inspired by the classic "I've Been Everywhere", and sang the vocals. The music was composed in Finale, and recorded and mixed in Audacity.

How did I sing so fast? (1) practice, (2) multiple takes, and (3) a little friendly help from Audacity, which lets you speed up a recording without changing the pitch. You can only take it so far before you get distortion, but it helped pick up the pace to what I wanted.

Most of the pictures are contributions from other SBI'ers, but some of them (stills and movies) were taken with my Canon PowerShot digital camera. The maps are screenshots from Google Maps. Graphic manipulations were in Paint Shop Pro X (including the editing necessary to get Shelly's arms and head to move in the end of the movie), and production was in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

The Video

Click To Play

The Lyrics

by Jon Forsyth

Shelly, the SBI tortoise,
She’s slow and she’s steady,
But she really gets around.

Shelly, the round-the-world tortoise,
She comes from Montreal,
But who knows where she’ll be found.

It might be... (lots of places: see below)

Shelly, the SBI tortoise,
She’s cute and she’s friendly
In every single way.

Shelly, she’s such a hard worker,
She’s workin’ on websites
Nearly every single day.

(And these were the places that I crammed into the song. I was specific as I could get -- in some cases, I only knew the state or country.)

Apache Junction, Arizona
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
California, Chloride, Arizona or Bahamas or
Cambridgeshire, UK,
East Islip, Long Island, New York or
Gibsons, British Columbia, Canada or
Glendale, Arizona

Maybe
Hampshire, England, Denmark, Iowa
Hutchinson in Kansas
Joliette, Québec, that’s Canada or
Kent, UK
Kentucky
Greater Cincinnati, Ohio
and London, England
Monroe, Washington
Murphy, North Carolina
Netherlands
Ontario, Canada

New York, New York
again Oregon
Ottawa now in Ontario
Rockwall, Texas
South Carolina
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
and South Africa
Upper Lake Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada
Westford, Massachusetts
then it’s back to Montreal

(SBI headquarters are in Montreal)

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