Shelly, the SBI Tortoise
A Video Scrapbook

"Shelly, the SBI Tortoise" is an example of a video scrapbook — a bunch of digital photographs put together around a theme and made into a video.

This tortoise video is one of my "SBI" (Site Build It) videos, along with I Love My SBI and The Secret Lives of Ken Evoy. SBI is a cool little company...but I'm getting off track.

SBI (the company) decided to make little pewter statuettes of its mascot, Shelly, the SBI tortoise, and send them to people who had made a significant contribution to SBI. I was amazed when my own little Shelly showed in a box in the mail.

I found out many others had received this unexpected gift, so I asked them to send me their pictures of Shelly so I could put them together into a video scrapbook. The video below is the result.

Creating Your Own Video Scrapbook

Scrapbooks are usually made around a theme, and each page (and the whole book) tells a little story. Regular paper scrapbook pages, including digital scrapbooks, are great, but the cool thing about a video scrapbook is the ability to add movement and sound to enhance your story.

With my SBI Tortoise video scrapbook, I had pictures of Shelly coming from all around the world, so I wrote a little song to represent all the places in the photos. I also recorded some short video clips of my own Shelly as transitions, and did a little "photoshopping" and animation with some of my tortoise photos. (Watch for the typing tortoise in the video below.)

As usual, Sony Vegas Home Studio was my software of choice for putting it all together. It's a very powerful program for a good price.

For your own video scrapbook, you don't have to write an original song, or even put in video clips — but you will want to:

• Put the photos together in a way that tells a story
• Add some music that supports or adds to the story
• Consider adding written titles or captions, or spoken narration

You can also make your video scrapbook more "scrapbooky" than I did — with more digital scrapbook elements like frames, borders, ribbons, and digital doo-dads. However you do it, have fun with it!

The SBI Tortoise Video Scrapbook

Click To Play

"Shelly, the SBI Tortoise" 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

or

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)