It all started a couple years before our last reunion. At a mini-reunion that Ron Blendu hosted in Idaho, we were watching a video that had been produced for the 30th reunion of the 1963 football team. It was very funny with exaggerated narration overlaid on old videos of cadet life and interspersed clips of old Hollywood movies pretending to represent the life of various members of the football team. Afterwards Leo Morehouse said that it would be nice to have a class DVD for our next reunion.
About six months later I asked Leo if he was interested in making a DVD. I had been using a video editing program for making DVDs from photos and videos, and thought it was doable if we could get enough material. So he agreed and put out an all-hands email asking for old photos, slides, and videos. He got about 7000 slides and went through each one looking for the more interesting ones which he had scanned. John Busavage had several thousand black and white 35mm and 2"x2" negatives he took as the class photographer for the yearbook. John sent those to me and I had to scan each of them in order to find ones that were interesting. In all we wound up with about a thousand scanned images and several hours of (mostly boring) video that various classmates had taken using 8mm video cameras. Leo had been thinking of just a simple slideshow type of DVD.
In looking at the material, Leo and I were trying to figure out how to make it interesting. I suggested that we get Flip involved because that was what he had done for a living. Flip was busy constructing a small resort in Mexico, but he agreed to help. The summer before the reunion, Flip and Leo flew to my house and we spent several days going through all the photos and categoring and ranking them. We came up with a draft storyboard.
We then split the work. Flip did a 40-minute slideshow with music. I finished the storyboard and made a 20-minute "Story of the Class of 66" with narration and music. Leo did the QA work - that bit is good, this bit is dumb, this bit needs some work. Flip advised me to introduce humor by having a narration that was serious but with video that showed just the opposite of what the narration said.
We did the work over the internet and mail. Flip has really poor mail service to the small village in Mexico but they have high-speed internet. I can't get highspeed. So most of the stuff we could do by internet, but when it came to an entire trial DVD that was too big for dialup, I would mail it to Leo and he would send it via the internet to Flip. As Flip finished each slideshow section he would put it up on the internet and I would download overnight.
I had recorded the narration for the part I was doing, but we wanted a professional narrator, so Flip got a friend who did that stuff for his old company near Monterey, CA. I sent the 20-minute video and storyboard with the narration script to his old company where they have a recording studio. Flip was in Mexico got on the phone to the audio studio and coached the professional narrator who made the audio narration as he watched the video. The studio engineer then emailed me the new narration MP3 files and I replaced all the existing narration in the DVD. Flip was going to be back in the California so I mailed him the master DVD and he went into his old company and used the DVD replication equipment to make the DVD's.
So there were several people involved, Leo, Flip, me, Flip's friend the professional narrator, as well as the equipment and studio at his old company, and all the stuff sent in by classmates. Nancy Grundel had a scrapbook of old documents such as the telegram to Ed's parents saying he had arrived safely but would be out of touch for a while. Ray Beyler kept a lot of old stuff including some old Chase Hall dining room menus.
